I really wanted to love this book, and I did at the beginning, but the more I read, the more I realised it was a “not for me” type of book. I think the book is great, but there are mainly two things that bothered me (not flaws of the book, just things that I personally don’t like). I know it’s not really a hardcore mystery novel, it has a lot more dimension than just the mystery parts, and it’s more focused on characters than the plot. But it does have a mystery flavour too, and I did not really like how episodes of the past are just revealed to the reader when the time has come to reveal them to us.
The most annoying thing to me is something that is very present in Korean fiction in my opinion: there’s an excess of out-of-the-ordinary characters. I don’t know how to describe it, but characters can never be boring, ordinary people to whom something happens. They all have either a traumatic past and extreme experiences, or have neurodivergent traits and personality disorders of some sorts (some recurring traits are not being able to have emotions or lacking empathy). The problem is that it’s not necessarily thematised, it’s more like a fictional trope.
But in this book in particular, though we do have a character lacking empathy, what bothered me is that all the main characters have a really heavy past and went through really traumatic experiences. The problem is that it’s true for all the main characters, so it kinds of loses its impact (at least that was my reading experience), and the novel wasn’t long enough to really spend a lot of time with each of them, when it feels like each of them would have necessitated a whole novel just for themselves.
Maybe for this reason, I never felt close nor really interested in any of the characters. It might just be that I spent too much time reading this book over a period of time that was too long, but as much as I loved the story, the characters left me mostly unmoved.