"If you wanted to describe Mina in a few words, you might say she was an asthmatic girl who loved words and rode a pygmy hippopotamus. But if you wanted to distinguish her from everyone else in the world, you'd say that she was a girl who could strike a match more beautifully than anyone."

you could probably just stick with the pygmy hippopotamus thing.

this is a very simple, plodding rendition of a time in a girl's life when she lived with her cousin mina, the match-lighter / hippo-rider mentioned above.

not much happens in this, and by the halfway mark i was tired of the idyllic perfection this whole book had in it: mina is perfect, and her house is perfect, and their time together is perfect, and pochiko the hippo is perfect, and nothing changes and nothing is complicated. you have kind of a sneaking sense that something bad might happen, but that doesn't change how one-note everyone's characterizations are.

mina and tomoko become obsessed with the japanese volleyball team at one point, which seems to serve primarily to lead us into a multi-chapter interlude of zionist sentiment. by this point, my patience had just about worn thin!

i love gossip, so i was excited to read this book about "buried secrets"...but they never got unburied. it was just a whole lot of nothing.

bottom line: justice for a little girl who rides a pygmy hippo. that deserves to be interesting.

(2.5 / thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)