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A review by theshiftyshadow
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
challenging
informative
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.5
I assume the author was maybe trying to tell the story of an entire country through this one family, and at times it worked well, at others it didn't.
The first 100 or so pages of this book are spent basically setting up what we already know from the very short blurb on the back of the book. It does add a lot more detail and context to it, obviously, but at the end of the day it still felt like the book was only beginning 100 pages in. Which isn't that big a deal, I guess, when the book is 560 pages long.
At this point the story switches to Japan and we get into the most interesting section of the book. We see this Korean family existing in the country that has colonized, and destroyed, their own, and much like every other story of colonization, they're not welcome, they're treated like scum, and they struggle to survive in a world where "home" doesn't exist anymore. This, for me, is where the book is at it's best, and despite skipping years at a time between chapters, we feel very much involved and invested in the lives of these characters.
It's weird, I've always known Japan invaded it's neighbours, and did a lot of awful things, even to their own people, but for some reason my brain never made the connection to them actually being colonizers. Coming from a country whose history is basically 800 years of being colonized, mass emigration (a lot of it to the country that colonized us), and a century spent trying to recover from that colonization, which includes a divided island, I was surprised to find so many similarities with these Korean characters, and the wider political situation they found themselves in.
Unfortunately towards the end of the book I think it just lost it's way. The time jumps became very random, and it felt like the author had a point to make with this last generation of the family, and just wanted to get to that point without giving it as much depth as the previous sections. That said, as a whole, I think the book does a great job of exploring the shared history these two/three countries have, and it definitely expanded my knowledge in a lot of areas, while leaving me with more questions I'm looking forward to finding out about myself.
The first 100 or so pages of this book are spent basically setting up what we already know from the very short blurb on the back of the book. It does add a lot more detail and context to it, obviously, but at the end of the day it still felt like the book was only beginning 100 pages in. Which isn't that big a deal, I guess, when the book is 560 pages long.
At this point the story switches to Japan and we get into the most interesting section of the book. We see this Korean family existing in the country that has colonized, and destroyed, their own, and much like every other story of colonization, they're not welcome, they're treated like scum, and they struggle to survive in a world where "home" doesn't exist anymore. This, for me, is where the book is at it's best, and despite skipping years at a time between chapters, we feel very much involved and invested in the lives of these characters.
It's weird, I've always known Japan invaded it's neighbours, and did a lot of awful things, even to their own people, but for some reason my brain never made the connection to them actually being colonizers. Coming from a country whose history is basically 800 years of being colonized, mass emigration (a lot of it to the country that colonized us), and a century spent trying to recover from that colonization, which includes a divided island, I was surprised to find so many similarities with these Korean characters, and the wider political situation they found themselves in.
Unfortunately towards the end of the book I think it just lost it's way. The time jumps became very random, and it felt like the author had a point to make with this last generation of the family, and just wanted to get to that point without giving it as much depth as the previous sections. That said, as a whole, I think the book does a great job of exploring the shared history these two/three countries have, and it definitely expanded my knowledge in a lot of areas, while leaving me with more questions I'm looking forward to finding out about myself.