My Year of Meats

My Year of Meats, by Ruth L. Ozeki. Discussing this book the other day, I called it fiction that reads like nonfiction. The novel ties together the stories of several different characters whose lives are all changed by common events. Its firm stance on the beef industry was not apparent in the first portion of the book, and came on too strongly, I felt, in the second half-- it made the book suddenly feel not like a novel anymore, just an anti-meat documentary in print.
The characters are painfully real; they truly feel like real people, with credible personalities and believable problems. The author was a documentary filmmaker, and her character's natural use of the equipment helps give a feeling of reality to their work.

The series, My American Wife!, initally seems like a dream come true for Jane as she criss-crosses the United States filming a different American family each week for her Japanese audience. Naturally, the emphasis is on meat, and Ozeki has fun with out-there recipes such as rump roast in coke and beef fudge; but as Jane becomes more familiar with her subject, she becomes increasingly aware of the beef industry's widespread practice of using synthetic estrogens on their cattle and determines to sabotage the program.
Cut to Tokyo where Akiko Ueno struggles through the dull misery of life with her brutish husband, who happens to be in charge of the show's advertising. After seeing one of Jane's subversive episodes about a vegetarian lesbian couple, Akiko gets in touch and the two women plot to expose the meat industry's hazardous practices. Romance, humor, intrigue, and even a message--My Year of Meats has it all. This is a book that even a vegetarian would love. -- from Amazon.com Editorial Review.