Author: Min Jin Lee
Year published: 2026
Category: Adult fiction
Pages: 656
Rating: 4.25 out of 5
Location: (my 2026 Google Reading map): USA (CA, NJ), Australia, and South Korea
Summary: In schools and churches, hotel rooms and nail salons, law firms and fried-fish shops; in cramped, dingy apartments and luxury, gated communities, the men, women, and children in American Hagwon struggle to find satisfaction and meaning in a world that seems to grow less forgiving with each passing year. Once comfortably middle class in Korea, John and Helen Koh and their three children―Bo, DH, and Mido―find their lives upended, first by a shocking betrayal by John’s oldest friend, then by the 1997 Asian financial crisis.
Desperately striving to regain their footing, they leave Seoul for Sydney and eventually settle in Southern California―where new vistas of opportunity open up for the children as their parents, strangers in a strange land, must adjust to a new life in which their experience and education mean little, and they set their sights on whatever it takes to provide for their children’s futures. The Kohs, their friends, relatives, and even their foes move in and out of each other’s lives as they navigate new courses across the years, always nursing the almost all-consuming faith that education will lead the next generation to success and security.
Review: Min Jin Lee's Pachinko was one of my favorite books when I read it (link to my review). Min Jin Lee is a master storyteller. She introduces each person with a detailed personality and backstory. We learn how they are all connected, why they matter to one another, and how their actions shape the larger story.
At over 600 pages, I worried that there would be too much detail, but I found that wasn't the case. I felt pulled into these characters' lives, their struggles, their relationships, and what they were facing. This really is a character-driven novel, which doesn't always work for me. However, Lee manages to connect everyone and everything so that their life stories feel like a plot.
I feel like I was reading the equivalent of a Korean drama (and, yes, they do play a role in the novel) except there was more sex (if you haven't watched a Korean drama before, they hardly hold hands and tend to kiss in episode 15 of 16). The characters are all related or friends, so even when someone feels peripheral, they are not. That worked well.
I also feel like I got a real sense of South Korean culture as it relates to work, family, and education, the focus of this novel (a Hagwon is an intense after-school tutoring program/school). The lengths middle-class and upper-class South Koreans will go to for a "perfect" education and admission to a top US (or Korean) college are astonishing. I found the novel well written, full of great characters, and culturally interesting.
Challenges for which this counts:
- Immigration--South Korea to Australia, South Korea to USA, USA to South Korea
- Literary Escapes--South Korea
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