Pachinko

Author: Min Jin Lee
Genre: Historical Fiction / Family Saga
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing, 2017
Pages: 512 (18 discs)
Rating: Do Not Recommend

Synopsis: 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.

Richly told and profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty. From bustling street markets to the halls of Japan's finest universities to the pachinko parlors of the criminal underworld, 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.

Review: I enjoy family sagas, and also hope to hit 20,000 pages read this year so this seemed like a win/win. I listened to the audio because it is such a thick, heavy book, and toting it around with me would be cumbersome.

The family saga side of this was rather bland. Lots of bad things happened, but occasionally something good came along, not unlike real life, I suppose, but does it make for the best reading? I'm not sure. 

Sunja was also maddeningly stubborn at times, and with my 2018 view of the world, it was hard to understand her point of view. Her sons seems stereotyped, one does very well in school; the other does not. One is pensive and thoughtful, the other is a fighter and a reactionary. 

I didn't love the narrator, but once I got used to her voice and the author's writing style, I found it didn't bother me as much and wasn't so distracting. There were chapters of this that I liked, and characters too, but as a whole, it was tedious. I was glad when it ended.

At the end of the day, I don't think I'll read another novel by this author.

For, what I think is better reading about Asian culture, check out Lisa See instead.