National Observer, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

Benny hears things and Annabelle hoards them. 

In her latest novel, The Book of Form and Emptiness, award-winning novelist Ruth Ozeki bears witness as a teenage boy and his mother, Benny and Annabel Oh, process their grief after Kenji — a kind, jazz-loving, pot-smoking clarinetist father and husband — suffers the ignoble death of being run over by a chicken truck in a grungy back alley.