THE DIVING POOL, by Yoko Ogawa

Three short stories from the award-winning Japanese writer feature odd people with odd habits and some really certifiable shortcomings. In the title piece, a girl whose parents operate an orphanage obsesses over Jun, a boy living at The Light House. The girl knows all the other children may be adopted, but she is doomed to stay in the hated place. The second piece, Pregnancy Diaries, reveals the emotions of a young woman coping with her sister's pregnancy. I suppose this is literary fiction, but I found the tortured inner scramblings of these people largely uninteresting, and I failed to drive myself to read the third story. A 3.

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