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Polly's Reviews > There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job

There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura
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Swooping in with one last book of 2020 just before the new year!

Having briefly skimmed reviews for There's No Such Thing As An Easy Job, they are incredibly mixed. And having read it, I can see why. To me, it was... fine. But I can understand why some people loved it, just as I can understand why some people hated it.

The biggest issue for me was that it felt like a book of four (long) short stories, rather than one piece of continuous writing. And as I'm rarely a big fan of short stories and tend to find collections of them frustrating to read, this probably explains my indifference towards the book.

There's an element of mundane surreality throughout this book – with slightly odd occurrences happening in each of the four jobs that the narrator takes on over the course of the year, but the agonising aspect for me was the total lack of answers. And for some people that's probably a source of great entertainment, but I'd rather have my mysteries solved.

What was relatable was the narrator being a millennial who dives in head-first with huge enthusiasm to new tasks, only to become bored or burnt out with them fairly quickly. The conclusion of what this means felt a little unsatisfying, and was extremely brief compared to the length of the book.

This wasn't really the book for me, however I didn't dislike it at all! I just never managed to quite connect with it.
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Reading Progress

November 27, 2020 – Started Reading
November 27, 2020 – Shelved
December 31, 2020 – Finished Reading

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