Book 30/30.
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I finished book 30 of 30 on the 30th (of June) and that was sooo exciting to me because:
1. I finished my 2023 reading challenge on the last day of the first half of the year 🤩🥳🤓
2. the numbers geek I am is ENCHANTED AF by 30 of 30 on 30 🤩🤓
I say all the time that I like to start and end my reading challenge on a high, hence I was goddamn sure I would LOVE Pachinko, that it would be an epic 5 star read, but sadly it was an average 3 star read 😥
Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty. In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant–and that her lover is married–she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision to abandon her home, and to reject her son’s powerful father, sets off a dramatic saga that will echo down through the generations. From bustling street markets to the halls of Japan’s finest universities to the pachinko parlors of the criminal underworld, Min Jin Lee‘s complex and passionate characters–strong, stubborn women, devoted sisters and sons, fathers shaken by moral crisis–survive and thrive against the indifferent arc of history.
This book taught me a lot about the dynamic between Koreans and Japanese as the story follows four generations of a Korean family through the political turmoil of Japanese colonisation, the hardship of wartimes, seeking a new and better life in Japan, and witnessing the home they left become divided into two countries they hardly recognise. I had no idea about the historical context this book is set in, and I always love when books educate me on something I had no idea about or expand my knowledge on something I was only aware of at a surface level. The author created really grounded settings for the characters, and I enjoyed seeing how she moved the story forward with historical shifts and how that reflected in the fate of her characters’ lives.
That said, because Lee covers sooo much history and sooo many characters, I never felt connected to anyone in particular. I liked a lot of characters well-enough, but I did not really like, or even love, a single character because we jumped in time sooo much and through sooo many characters that I never understood why I should care about them, only that they were related to previous characters. The novel moved from character to character through the years with no real explanation as to why we are back with them. One chapter would end and the next would pick up the story many years later where we see everything from some other characters perspective with so many changes in their lives, and that narrative technique was ultimately unsatisfying for me.
Pachinko has a rating of 4.32 on Goodreads and was nominated for a Goodreads Choice Award for Best Historical Fiction in 2017, but it lost out to Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate, and rightfully so because that book was PHENOMENAL!!! Pachinko is a well-researched and sweeping novel, and while I can understand why so many people loved this book, it did not have enough of an emotional thread to lure me in and sweep me off my feet.
** A guide to ratings **
1 star – did not like it
2 stars – it was okay
3 stars – liked it
4 stars – really liked it
5 stars – it was amazing
Lwile the Leo 