Hi everyone. I'm Rincey and this is Rincey Reads.
Today I'm going to be doing a book review on
Panchinko by Min Jin Lee. This is a new
release. I believe it just came out
in February. I got it in my February book of
the month box. And I really enjoyed this
book a lot. And I want to highly
recommend it to people. I think there were
a lot of people who are picking up this
book from book of the month. And then
when I posted a picture of this on
Instagram a lot of people are really
interested in it because this cover is
like gorgeous, which is completely
understandable. And I'm here to say that
picking it up just based on the cover I
feel like will lead to good results. So this is
a multi-generational family story.
It follows a family of Koreans who are
living in Japan starting in like the
early 1900s through about
the 1980s. So you follow
about three or four different
generations over the course of that time.
I really enjoyed this book a lot.
It reminded me a lot of Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi,
which was my favorite book of the last year.
I don't think it's quite up to that
standard but I still think it's a really
fantastic story. It was really
surprising to me how quickly I connected
to the story. I'm not completely sure how
but Min Jin Lee makes, made me care about
this family almost from the very
beginning. I think because she creates a
very sympathetic character in the
beginning of the story, at least in my
opinion, and then you get to see them
have their family. And so you become
attached to this family because of this
way that this first generation was.
At least that's how it was for me and so I
really cared about all the other
generations that you got to see. And you
get see sort of like offshoots of them
as well. So you might see like the daughter's
husband's family a little bit as well and
things like that. So it's more than just
following this one single family line
down. You get to see little bits of the
offshoots here and there.
The other thing that I really liked in
the story is the fact that it's filled
with a lot of unlikable characters, in my
opinion, and it's filled with a lot of
characters who make not great decisions
in life. But you can understand why
they're making the decisions that
they're making for the most part. There
are a couple of characters that you come
across where you don't really understand
where they're coming from. Because
this is like an Asian / Japanese culture,
there is a little bit of distance,
I think or a little bit of like
coldness here in this family sometimes.
But I think that's because of the
culture there. I think that one of the
best things about this story is that it talks
about the experience of being a Korean
in Japan because that's something that
personally I don't have a lot of
experience with or know a lot of the
history. But there's apparently a lot
of tension there and a lot of
discrimination that happened towards
Koreans especially like after the world
wars and such. There was a lot of like
poverty and struggle for Japanese people
during this time and a lot of them took
it out on Koreans. They see Koreans
as like second-class citizens and seeing
how even Koreans who are like born in Japan
are not considered like Japanese
citizens, which is like so different
obviously than the way it is in the United
States. Obviously you know, the United
States has plenty of problems. But you know like if
you're born in the United States you're a U.S.
citizen like by law. But that's not
necessarily how it is in Japan, which I found
so fascinating. So seeing the struggles of
immigrants and seeing how different
generations are treated differently and
how they approach the situation
differently and seeing how all of it
played out was really, really fantastic.
Obviously everyone knows that I'm a
sucker for stories about immigrants, even
if they're not immigrants in the United States.
And so this completely played
into that so well and is part of the reason
why I loved it so much.
There's also a lot of really great
discussion in here about family and who is
like considered family and the people
that you love in your life and things
like that which I just love so much. There's a
lot of really complex feelings happening
in here. This is not like a
black-and-white book at all, which I
really, really love. I would just honestly I
highly, highly, highly recommend this book
if you are interested in this at all.
Or if you're interested in just like family
sagas or immigrant narratives or just
learning more about the culture that you
might not know that much about, like me.
Then yeah, this book is really well
done. I give it a 4 out of 5 stars. Like I
said, I didn't love this quite as much as Homegoing,
but I think that if you liked Homegiong,
you will enjoy this one as well.
So yeah, those are my quick thoughts on
Panchinko by Min Jin Lee.
If you've read this book, definitely leave a
comment down below. I'd love to talk
about this with other people. I know
there are other people who picked this one
up from book of the month. Or if you have any
questions about the book obviously you
can leave that down in the comment
section as well. So yeah that's all I have
for now and thanks for watching.
