Kanae Minato has a distinct writing style: showing the dark sides of the society while handling the readers puzzle pieces without showing them the final picture. And here it is the same, but the puzzle pieces are four traumatised women and a grieving mother.
However I found it lacking compared to her award winning work, Confessions. The women have similar voices that made it hard for me to distinguish between them... except the first woman in 'French Doll', with its chilling antagonist that was not simply the murderer.

An unusual story about guilt and revenge, in which no one comes out well. Not normally a fan of the same story told through multiple points of view, but it worked in this case.

The storytelling style is unique, and Minato does a very good job of keeping readers on the hook by slowly doling out info about the same tragic event as it's remembered by each narrator. The mystery is compelling but it's not even the book's most arresting feature, which is its exploration of how the Japanese deal with shame and guilt and regret. Minato's subtlety of language nevertheless conveys the depth of trauma that can be inflicted on children and how it manifests in them as adults. The only reason I didn't give PENANCE more stars was because the killer's motivation is murky, especially considering the chronology of events, but I do recommend the book overall.

Loved this story!! A mother threatens four little girls when her daughter is found dead. Her threat looms largely over their lives forevermore. Reading about how these girls dealt with the threat was fascinating. Such a great story!!

When a young girl is murdered, her mother vows to take revenge on her friends, who were unable to assist the police in discovering the culprit. Tense, moody and suspenseful, this was a compelling novel.

Creepy and strange, an all around great read.

I was sucked in by this beautiful cover, but I found the book a little disappointing. The different narratives were compelling, but the ending felt a little anticlimactic. It's a bold choice to write a mystery novel without revealing the mystery, and I'm not sure it works here.

Thank you for allowing me to read this early release so I can review. This book was worth the time just needed a bit more "something" to make it stand out

Penance is a Japanese novel translated into English by Philip Gabriel. The author’s first novel, Confessions, is one that I’ve had on my wish list for a long time. Therefore, I was excited to get the chance to read Penance. I love books that are translated from another language or take place in a different country. Even with books like Penance, that deal with a murder mystery, readers are still able to learn about a culture or country different from their own.

While Penance would be a hard book to rate, I did enjoy it. It was a fairly quick read and included perspectives from all four girls. These girls were just children when their friend Emily is murdered. Despite this awful event, Emily’s mother ends up blaming the girls years later. They were playing with Emily when the man came up to them, yet none of the girls could tell the police what the man’s face looked like. The details they did remember were varied depending on which girl was talking. Emily’s mother, Asako, lets her grief and anger spill over onto these young girls and tells them they will either figure out who murdered Emily or serve a penance that she feels is worthy enough. It’s a damning proclamation and one that none of the girls forget.

The book goes from one perspective to another, and I liked how each one was told. One person -Sae- writes a letter, while another is having a conversation. All of these styles made the book a quick, easy read. It brings readers in and makes them feel like each girl’s tale of their lives post-murder is being told directly to them. There is a bit of suspension of disbelief with Penance. I don’t want to spoil anything, so I’ll just say that while it’s all realistic and could happen, it would be a really big coincidence if all the events in this book actually took place. Despite that, I did enjoy this book and I definitely want to read Confessions even more now!

This was my first Minato book but it won't be my last! Four young friends are playing together when a man approaches and asks for some help. Eager to be useful, they all volunteer but he picks Emily. I loved how the book vacillated between the girls who witnessed the aftermath of their friend's murder and then gave us the viewpoint of the victim's mother. I'm a fan of alternating points of view in novels and this one was even more entertaining because as the girls were so young, the guilt that eats at them is expressed in different ways as they feel they must make peace with the mother as she initially threatens them. As they each grow up, they react differently to people and relationships in their lives, but the murder is never forgotten. Well-written and suspenseful, this novel was one of my top picks of the year.

Five girls go out to play and only four come home. Sae, Maki, Akiko, and Yuko were a close group of friends, joined by Emily in the summer of fourth grade, whose family just moved to their rural town. One day a man approaches them while they’re playing, asks if one of them could help him for a moment, and walks off with Emily. A few hours later, she’s found dead. The problem is, the four remaining girls can’t remember what the man looked like.

Penance takes place over a decade after these events, in five chapters told from the point of view of each of the girls and Emily’s mother, and focuses on the aftermath of the murder, and the effect it had on each of them.

I could not put this book down. It’s not really a gripping page-turner in the sense that there’s an urgent mystery to solve or anything like that. It’s more of a psychological thriller, which thoroughly examines the role that guilt plays in the lives of each of the girls, and how a promise they made to Emily’s mother prevents each of them from living a normal life. Each of the characters is compelling – Emily’s mother perhaps most of all – and the numerous layers to this story makes it an engaging read. Penance explores themes of guilt, rage, retribution, and revenge, centering entirely on a host of female characters, each with a distinct voice and personality.

Certain aspects of this story are unrealistic – something happens to each of the girls that’s like, ‘what are the odds?’ – but it honestly lends this story the air of a parable, something that feels more like a story than something that could happen in real life. But that’s okay. It’s a damn good story.

Fair warning: this is a dark book. Trigger warnings for rape, suicide, child abuse, and violence. Proceed with caution.

I received a copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you Netgalley, Mulholland Books, and Kanae Minato.

I found this book on Netgalley and couldn't resist requesting it. It is a good read, but I can't quite decide which genre it belongs to.

Penance is ostensibly a mystery. Five children are playing at school when one of them ends up dead after a mysterious man takes her away. The four of them swear that they can't remember what the man looks like and Emily, the dead girl's mother, curses them to either help solve the murder or do a penance.

That said, the book isn't so much about who killed Emily but what happened to Sae, Akiko, Mae, and Yuko as the deadline for the statute of limitations draw closer. Each of them is affected by the murder in a different way, but they are all driven to tragic ends. There is a clue from each of the girls, but the denouement is more about Emily's mother than the murderer.

I guess that if I had to sum up the book, it would be that it's more about the emotions that drive people to murder and the ripple effect that it causes.

Each girl gets her own story, and it's not until the later half that things start to come together. But I was really captivated from the start, because of how the relationships were written. They're sad and oddly fascinating.

For example (please ignore this if you don't want spoilers, though I will try to avoid the biggest one): Sae feels that the murderer chose Emily as his victim because she had already started menstruating and was thus a woman. The stress from this causes her not to menstruate at all. Despite this, she manages to get married, only to find out that her husband proposed only because she looks like the doll he was fascinated with and he's thrilled to have a real life doll now.

This book is dark and twisted and it's absolutely captivating. It's not a very long read but it manages to pack a punch. I wasn't able to put it down, which explains why I have a book review 2 days after the previous one. If you're in the mood for something dark and definitely not-cheery, you need to read this.

Disclaimer: I got a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for a free and honest review.

Survivor guilt...

Five young girls sneak into their school playground on a holiday to practice volleyball. While there, a workman arrives and asks if one of them will help him do a small job in the changing room. It's a while before the other girls notice that Emily hasn't returned, and when they look for her, it's too late – all they find is her body. None of the girls is able to describe the man well – they are young, they weren't paying particular attention, they are suffering from shock. As time passes without an arrest, in her grief Emily's mother tells them they must either give the police enough information to catch the killer, or do something that she will accept as appropriate atonement. She gives them a deadline – the statute of limitations on the crime will run out in fifteen years...

In Minato's earlier excellent book, Confessions, she looked at the motivation for crime and at revenge. In this one, she takes a fascinating look at how a crime affects not only the direct victim, but the people touched by it in other ways. Each of the four surviving girls, now women, tells her tale in turn. We see how their immediate reactions to the crime were affected by their own personalities, and then Minato takes us into their families so that we can see how each of those personalities was formed. This provides a base for taking us forwards from the crime, seeing how it affected each child as she grew up – not just the horror of the day itself, but the guilt of knowing that they had neither protected Emily nor helped bring her killer to justice, and the fear of knowing that the killer is still at large knowing they are the only witnesses.

As the deadline for the statute of limitations approaches, we see how for each girl this leads indirectly to a kind of crisis. Minato doesn't forget the grieving mother in all this – years on, does she still feel the same? Does she still require the girls to do penance, or has time enabled her to see that the girls were victims too? And lastly, almost as a minor story, will time allow the girls to recognise small clues that they missed in their youth, in time for the murderer to be caught?

When reading Japanese fiction, I often find the society so different from our Western one that it's almost incomprehensible to me. I've commented in the past that there seems to be a huge disconnect between the generations, that young people seem to have rejected the values of their parents but haven't yet found anything to replace them with, leaving a dangerous moral vacuum. Intriguingly, that isn't the case with this one. Perhaps because it's set in a small town rather than in Tokyo, the family structures seem stronger and more traditional, though we see clearly how sons are still more valued than daughters. Some of these families have problems, indeed, but the kind of problems we would be familiar with in our own society. I also noted that Minato mentioned in passing that there seems to be a slight move away from driving the children quite so hard towards educational success at the expense of all else – a small recognition of the harm that can be caused by the excessive stress that was being put on young people. And this is one of the reasons I enjoy her books – she always provides intriguing insights into society, especially family life and education, in modern Japan.

But she also tells a great tale! I was completely caught up in each girl's story and, while there are moments that stretch credulity, it never goes past the breaking point. The characterisation is excellent, and though we see the murder again and again, each voice and perspective is original enough to stop it feeling repetitive. After the murder, the girls' lives go off in different directions, so Minato has room to cover a lot of ground with four very different stories, but all linked to the central event so that with each telling the reader learns a little more about the lead up to and aftermath of the crime. And in the final chapters she manages to bring it all together, so that there's a real feeling of resolution – not a slick happy ending, but a sense of closure for some of the characters at least. Another excellent novel from Minato – my tentative love affair with the strangeness of Japanese crime fiction continues...

NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Mulholland Books.

I burned through the last 75% of this in one extended sitting. I only stopped to eat, use the bathroom, and update my status on Goodreads when something remarkable happened, which was quite often, I must say.

Penance was the perfect book for me at this moment in my life. I've grown impatient with the same old, same old, and this book was anything but that. Oddest of all is, I should have hated this book. It does three things that usually annoy the fuck out of me:

#1. It has something I call the "Vantage Point Plot", wherein one dramatic scene is told from a bunch of different viewpoints. That normally gets old real quick, but here it was fresh because every chapter showed you the aftereffects of each individual, and each aftereffect was drastically different. Some were creepy as balls, others were tense, some were sad, but every single one of them was interesting. Thank fuck for that miracle.

#2. This is basically a mosaic novel. I've not had great success with mosaic novels. If you don't know what one is, I'll give you a brief explanation. A mosaic novel is a series of vignettes or short stories that are connected by one central event or theme. Here it works because we're so close to each character. The detailed explanations of each character's life at the beginning of their chapters might bore some of you. They bored me a bit. But by the end of each chapter I saw just how needed all that information was. Be patient with this one. Each section pays off.

#3. First-person POVs from multiple characters. This is a style I can't fucking stand. It rarely works well, especially when each character is speaking to someone off screen, as it were, like in novels based on an interview structure, but here it fits perfectly. In fact, any book I read from here on out that has chapters from different first-person POVs will be stacked and judged against this novel. It was so well done. I was never confused as to who's head I was in because each and every person got their own quarantined section. Beautiful.

Finally, this was just an easy read. Something I didn't have to think too hard about, but not so simple that I thought the author was speaking down to me. The translation is terrific. I don't feel that anything was lost in translation. I can't say that for certain, seeing as I don't speak Japanese and have not read the original text, but usually you can sit back and say, "Something about that doesn't sound right."

In summation: I am happy as hell that I snagged this one off NetGalley in return for the review you just read. I'll likely buy this in hardcover or paperback or whichever format it comes out in upon release in the States. It's rare that I buy books I've received ARCs of, but this will more than likely be one of them... as long as it's decently priced. You never know with this translated novels, seeing as how they have to essentially pay two authors. If you like your mysteries built with abnormal frames, give this one a look-see.

Final Judgment: Some of everything and not a thing bad.

As children, Sae, Maki, Akiko and Yuko were separated from their friend, Emily. Hours later, she is found murdered. Unable to provide any answers to the police and unable to find the murderer, Emily’s mother curses the girls, vowing that they will pay for her daughter's murder.

I am always looking to add diversity to my reading rotation, so when I saw Penance, by Kanae Minato, and realized I had never heard of this author before, I decided to add this novel (translated from its original Japanese) into my rotation. I have never read any books by a Japanese author before so I wasn’t sure what to expect. What an experience.

When I come across a new author, the first thing I do is google them. Apparently, Kanae Minato is known as the “Queen of Iyamisu” which is literally an “eww” mystery. This is a subgenre of mystery fiction, which deals with grisly episodes and the dark side of human nature.

After reading this novel, I totally get this.

Penance was dark, incredibly creepy, grotesque and also quite lyrical in its narration. If there were ever a novel to look at the dark side of human nature, this would be it!! It’s portrayal of sorrow, revenge and redemption had me completely sucked in. Secrets are told, tragedies are revealed and the reader is shown the effect that a single incident has on a group of women.

The plot was extremely complex and often slightly confusing, but I feel like that was an issue more within the translation to English than the actual fault of the author. Minato clearly knows how to write a plot that weaves through your bones and squeezes tight. This one sat with me long after I had finished the final pages.

I will absolutely be hunting down other novels by this author (apparently, Confessions is amazing) so I can experience more of her work. Loved it. 4/5 stars.

Five ten year old friends go to, their school to play, only four will return alive. The mother of the girl who does not return, threatens the remaining girls, telling them that by the time the statute of limitations is expired on her daughter's murder, the remaining girls must either write a confession or perform an act of penance.

I read this author's novel Confession last year and found it intriguing, and really loved the insidious nature of evil it depicted . This premise sounded equally intriguing and it did start well, with the same creepy overtone but this is where the similarities ended. These novels are told in an very dispassionate voice, which adds to tension the scenarios provoke, and this one also duplicated that tone. Yet, the stories told by each girl were at times repetitious which is to be expected because many of the details of the murders were the same, but the stories about their lives after the crime and threat, went on too long, at least in my opinion. There were unusual revelations, surprising reveals but in the end found this at times very good and at times boring. So a very mixed read for me, but still a very different type of story.

ARC from Netgalley.

I read Confessions from this author and loved it, a one sitting read and Penance was another one sitting read. It was strange and dark, occasionally heart breaking and beautifully done. Translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel I was immediately hooked in to this tale of a group of children caught up in the horrific murder of one of their friends, a sinister threat from the girls mother and how that affected them growing up..

Penance is less a murder mystery and more a character drama – the murder, and the mothers emotionally charged “threat” setting off a chain of life events for the 4 girls and indeed for the mother herself. Each girl tells her tale, about that day and about their lives after, all of them in one way or another end up paying that “Penance” that was demanded of them at a young and impressionable age. Kenae Minato really delves into personality here, taking us on a twisted, atmospheric journey through the lives of these characters, whose realities differ so much but all are tied into a seemingly unbreakable bond to that one event.

The cultural aspects are equally involving, as I read I got a real sense of both the differences and the similarities between life in Japan and life here – there are different expectations, different society rules and hierarchy, but people are people everywhere. Grief, love, trauma, those things have no borders and I was struck by how beautifully the author managed to portray the feelings, the passion, the core heart of everyone we meet within the pages.

Utterly riveting, everything in Penance hovers underneath the surface, the decisions made, the actions taken, all informed by the past at differing levels. The plotting is taut and extraordinarily clever, its not until you come to the end of Penance and look back at it that you understand fully the complete tragedy. Because Penance is a tragedy, almost Shakespearean in nature, I devoured every word of it with a shivery intensity.

Absolutely Highly Recommended.

**Review also available on Goodreads and Amazon**

When I began reading I had expected a violent revenge story, but what I got was much darker and more insidious. Penance explores grief, guilt, and the different ways that people deal with trauma.

The story begins innocently enough, following a group of country girls living in a rural town where everyone knows each other. There is a lot of commentary on rural versus city life and the way that people from both walks of life view each other. The town is simple, ideal even, safe enough where residents felt comfortable leaving their doors unlocked and let their children play outside unattended. It reminded me of my own childhood and it really hit home how different life was back then compared to the present day. The horrible events that happen throughout each of the stories to me were very realistic scenarios, making them that much more horrifying in a visceral way.

The chapters tell the stories of each of the girls, now young women, and the way that they experienced the crime and their lives afterward. The stories are told in the first person and because of this, I felt fully immersed in the lives of these women and understood them emotionally. The scars left behind by the tragedy are clear, shaping and distorting each of the girls’ personalities as they are ripped away from childhood innocence and thrust into adulthood. Each of the girls finds themselves haunted by the past, dissecting the event, questioning their own culpability in the death of their friend, worrying over what they did and what they could’ve done, and dreading how close they were to a horrible fate themselves. Emily wasn’t the only victim that day.

To fully understand the tone of the narrative, it’s important to look at the title. Penance, to repent for one’s sins. The Japanese title is Shokuzai, which means atonement. It is only after repenting and learning from past mistakes that one can find absolution. Penance is about the messy path from suffering and agony to forgiveness, it is every bit as beautiful as it is disturbing.

A fair warning, some of the content is distressing and extremely difficult to handle. There were several times where, when I knew what was coming in the next scenes, I honestly had to put the book down to calm my nerves and wipe away tears before I could continue. I absolutely loved this book and cautiously recommend it for those that enjoy heart wrenching suspense stories.

Penance. A punishment. Something done to repent a sin. How does someone atone for something that was never their fault? Five young girls went out to play but only four ever made it home. Those four girls did not witness the murder, but they did see the murderer, and the body, and have to live with the trauma. As if that were not enough, the killer was not caught, and the mother of the victim blamed them. In the course of that single event, the lives of these four girls was forever changed, and affected every aspect of their lives as they grew from happy children to the troubled young women that they were never meant to be.