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A review by bookph1le
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
4.0
A sprawling family epic that was deeply engrossing. This is a slow-moving book, so not the kind of thing you want to pick up if you're looking for a fast-paced page-turner. However, I found the family story deeply compelling and often disturbing. As someone not of Asian descent born and bred in the U.S., this book covers a period of history about which I've known very little, much to my chagrin, so the cultural elements were extremely eye-opening for me.
The characters are all fully realized and flawed, some more profoundly and frustratingly than others, which is why I'm ultimately giving this 4 stars instead of 5. I got so frustrated with some of the characters that it made certain sections of the novel hard for me to read. Hansu in particular bothered me because to me the book felt too ambivalent about him.
I'm not sure exactly how I'd describe the prose. It felt almost sparse to me in some ways, but that's not because it's not detailed; rather, the storytelling is unadorned, and I admired the book for it. There are some scenes of great beauty and great tragedy that I think a more florid style would have undermined.
The characters are all fully realized and flawed, some more profoundly and frustratingly than others, which is why I'm ultimately giving this 4 stars instead of 5. I got so frustrated with some of the characters that it made certain sections of the novel hard for me to read. Hansu in particular bothered me because to me the book felt too ambivalent about him.
I'm not sure exactly how I'd describe the prose. It felt almost sparse to me in some ways, but that's not because it's not detailed; rather, the storytelling is unadorned, and I admired the book for it. There are some scenes of great beauty and great tragedy that I think a more florid style would have undermined.