From the very first chapter of this novel, you know you're dealing with an unreliable narrator who can't quite figure out what's happened in his life. Did Lee murder his roommate or not? He can't remember what he did with the body. So, maybe not? How about his mother's disappearance when he was a child? That storyline seems sketchy, too. He's fled to Japan where his father is living in what used to be a Samurai's house, and he's stopped taking his sedatives to try to figure out what's real and what's not in his brain-protected trauma memories. Meanwhile, his new bedroom has turned into a sort of time bridge between late 1800s Japan and the present day. There, he meets the former occupant of his bedroom: a young lady named Sen who is training to become a Samurai and living with her family, servants, and utterly abusive Samurai father. But is she a ghost or a time traveler?

This whole story is a big head trip. The reader is trying to figure out exactly what has happened, and also trying to understand the very foreign way both Lee and Sen think. There are lots of very gruesome scenes. And then the ending is nothing you'd ever expect, if you can manage to hold together all the threads in your head for long enough to understand exactly what's been going on. Yes, it's one of those kinds of books, but it's also kind of brilliant.

This book is constantly in demand at the library where I work with patrons continuing to ask me if I've read it yet. Okay. Now, I've read it. It's a feel-good, small-town cast of characters book meant to wrench your heart strings. And I felt like the secret of the book was broadcast pretty loud (at least for me) from the start. So, there was no big reveal.

I feel like I'm not the demographic for not getting bored with the formula of books like this after a while. A mysterious stranger comes to town, he falls in love with the artist-drawn portraits on the walls of a coffee shop, starts buying them, and starts meeting strangers at a bench by the town fountain to give them away to the people whose portraits they are. I asked someone who insisted I read this if it was just going to be 400 pages of sappy meetings with people to give them their portrait. She assured me it wasn't. It kind of was. I mean, other things happened, but basically it was this generous stranger having conversations with the townspeople and inching his way into their lives after first giving them their portraits.

Is it a good book? Yes. Is it memorable? Yes. Does it have all the trappings of a Hallmark feel-good movie? Yes. I get the feeling that that's why it's so popular. It's just not my preferred sort of escapism. 5-stars for being a good book in general. 3-stars for my personal enjoyment level.