Book No. 41 of 2020
This was an aching illustration of the long generational aftermath of trauma: how one young Korean refugee girl’s decision shapes her family’s fate in the following decades.
There is a very fatalistic feel to the story—you can almost feel the descent, like gravity, as you slide toward its inevitable finale. On the way, though, there is brightness and very human moments of beauty, and passages that depict the warmth of love and childhood.
Similar Reads
I found this book structurally and thematically similar to Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko.
Some of the tragic fatalism (and characters’ inability to save others) reminded me of Mira T. Lee’s Everything Here is Beautiful.
The theme of how trauma shapes generations reminded me of Jacqueline K. Woodson’s Red at the Bone.