Author: Min Jin Lee Genre: Historical Fiction Pages/Length: 484 pages
★★★☆☆ 3 stars
Book Summary: Sunja is a young Korean girl who falls for the wrong man. This character-driven historical fiction follows a strong matriarch and her family as they face discrimination, war, poverty, and the criminal underworld.
Book Review: This book was well written, genuine, symbolic, and moderately entertaining. I liked many of the characters, and while I’m not usually a fan of historical fictions I actually found myself enjoying it at times. That being said, I feel that it was too long and that the novel might have been more enjoyable if the third section were cut out completely.
Quotes: “’Sunja-ya, a woman’s life is endless work and suffering. There is suffering and then more suffering. It’s better to expect it, you know. You’re becoming a woman now, so you should be told this. For a woman, the man you marry will determine the quality of your life completely. A good man is a decent life, and a bad man is a cursed life-but no matter what, always expect suffering, and just keep working hard. No one will take car of a poor woman-just ourselves.’” “’A God that did everything we thought was right and good wouldn’t be the creator of our universe. He would be our puppet. He wouldn’t be God. There’s more to everything than we can know.’” “’There’s no such thing as a benevolent leader. I protect you because you work for me. If you act like a fool and go against my interests, then I can’t protect you. As for these Korean groups, you have to remember that no matter what, the men who are in charge are just men-so they’re not much smarter than pigs. And we eat pigs.’” “Every morning, Mozasu and his men tinkered with the machines to fix the outcomes-there could only be a few winners and a lot of losers. And yet we played on, because we had hope that we might be the lucky ones. How could you get angry at the ones who wanted to be in the game? Etsuko had failed in this very important way-she had not taught her children to hope, to believe in the perhaps absurd possibility that they might win. Pachinko was a foolish game, but life was not.”
Spoilers: When I read Noa’s death, I felt absolutely gutted. I always applaud authors who write characters so well that they are mourned by the reader when they’re gone. I also liked the message of Mozasu’s plotline: even though he struggled in school, he was still able to succeed in life. As for the third portion of the book, I think it was unnecessary. I couldn’t connect to the characters and I felt that it moved too quickly and felt too modern compared to the rest of the book. I think that they served the mere purpose of contributing to the page count, that’s all.
