Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
Published February 7th 2017
Pachinko follows one Korean family through the generations, beginning in early 1900s Korea with Sunja, the prized daughter of a poor yet proud family, whose unplanned pregnancy threatens to shame them all. Deserted by her lover, Sunja is saved when a young tubercular minister offers to marry and bring her to Japan.
So begins a sweeping saga of an exceptional family in exile from its homeland and caught in the indifferent arc of history. Through desperate struggles and hard-won triumphs, its members are bound together by deep roots as they face enduring questions of faith, family, and identity.
This book is very different from a lot of books I normally pick up but I was really excited to read it. Pachinko sounded amazing and I loved the assurance given from the synopsis for rich culture through out this book.
I really enjoyed the first half of this book a lot more than the last half. I really liked pace of the first half but it did start to slow down and drag at times. This is book is on the larger side, almost 500 pages, so the length didn’t help the slower pace. It wasn’t necessarily boring but compared to the first 200 or so pages, it was much slower.
I did love the culture in Pachinko. That was actually my favorite part about the book. It was so interesting and I loved seeing a new perspective. I really learned a lot and that was pretty cool.
Overall, if you’re looking for an interesting, diverse historical fiction, Pachinko is definitely a book to pick up. But if you want something fast paced, you might want to skip this one.
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