Relevant but dry and operational with the language it uses; this is supposed to be excusable when the narrator of the book is revealed in the end, but (aside from the fact that the reveal opens up some plotholes like a bunch of internal monologues that she has and inconsistencies with the narrator's sociopolitical consciousness while narrating her past vs present events), by trying to seem objective with the statistics and matter-of-fact style, the full affective impact of the personal anecdotes are diminished, and by trying to inspire sympathy by loading you up with anecdotes before sharing a statistic, the narratives become an essay instead of a novel.

I just feel like this would've been better told by the protagonist herself, not the narrator we ended up getting. I understand that maybe the point was to double down on the many ironies that were shared in individual anecdotes by giving us the narrator as a structural irony, but I don't see how that could really inspire sympathy (which would result in action) in the end, and it's not enough to call the book literary; so it loses out on both ends.

The hook was really good, and could have been used to move a lot of action, but it was not revisited until the very end. I'm sad that this was so bad for me because it's a good primer for what a lot of real-life South Korean women have to go through, but that's all it is: a primer. It's not a good novel. I'd rather have watched a documentary about it.