dpower711 's review for:

All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung

2.0

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This book does not deserve the high praise it gets. Elevator pitch-wise the story of someone who was adopted, wrestled with ethic identity (but not enough to learn Korean until adulthood and only then at the behest of a child) and subsequent birth family finding, sounds great on paper. Yet it doesnt read well on paper. If a fellow student had given me this manuscript and whispered, What do you think? I'd had have to start finding ways to constructively let them down and not ever pursue a career as a writer. How could she make such a gripping topic so substandard and dull? Before each major plot piece, she subjected us to a drawn out inner monlogue. Had this been in any way literary it would have been fine. But it wasn't. It is almost terrible writing. The fact that the acknowledgements thanked an editor also shocked me. It does not read like a manuscript that was ever read by an editor.