This book reminded me a lot of some of the Korean TV shows or movies that I’ve seen – and maybe it was written to end up as a visual drama.
I’m not sure I “got” the story here. It seems to be addressing several issues – a woman’s right to control her own body, outdated patriarchal family structures, the preoccupation with how other people perceive you. Some of this is cultural, some psychological, but none of it is really clear. I felt like the character viewpoints switching as they did were distracting rather than revelatory, and it felt like the whole book was sort of built about one particular scene that was in the author’s mind.
The good news was that the story was fairly compact, and it didn’t take long to read the book. It is rare for me to read books about Korean people or culture, so I was glad to get a glimpse at some of the differences between their culture and Japan and the United States.
Overall I thought the writing itself was well done, but the story didn’t quite come off. I will be unsurprised if this ends up as a drama in the next year or two. I’m not sure I’ll watch it, though.
Next I am reading The Big Empty by Robert Crais, one of my favorite private investigator series that reminds me of Spenser.
