Reviews with content warning for Addiction - Pachinko

Lee hits the ground running in this family saga; unfortunately, her pace peters out. The beginning of this book has it all. The characters are well-developed and interesting as they struggle with colonization, war, and relationships. Lee quickly and wonderfully establishes themes and creates excellent ideas to begin moving her plot along. She has a wonderful writing style throughout, which feels classic and epic. Her use of omniscient narration works very well for her story and characters. Every moment and insight into the characters feels like a very natural and intimate dialogue the reader is privy to.

Unfortunately, about two-thirds through the book, the characters, plot, and themes fall apart. Lee moves too fast through time, not allowing time to develop the later generation of her characters or the themes she has set up. Instead of exploring the point she is trying to make about life and the world, Lee falls into the trap of focusing on spurts of drama that make the reader feel empty due to lack of time for character building. She relies on tropes that occasionally go directly against her themes and certainly never adds anything to them.

Lee writes about a very intriguing and important part of history that is rarely told and starts off wonderfully with vivid characters and ideas. However, the novel's structure could have benefited more by building more on her later characters to round out her themes.

Content Warnings

mysterymom40's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous emotional informative reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

Content Warnings

rit's review against another edition

Go to review page

informative inspiring lighthearted reflective relaxing sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

This is an amazing book. The story told feels so real, it made me feel like I was there and the characters were my best friends. I felt mad, I felt happy, I felt in love and I felt sad through the history of a family during WWII. I highly recommend it, but be aware of all its trigger warnings.

Content Warnings

madi22w's review

Go to review page

adventurous emotional inspiring reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.5

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee is a masterpiece of a book. Taking you through three generations of families, Lee ensured that you were close to individual members of the family as well as generations and cities as a whole. The main point of her book, being to demonstrate the divided between Koreans and Japanese in Japan, was communicated well, but it didn’t feel extremely obvious that this was the point of the book. The only reason why I dropped some points was because I thought that some of the plot points didn’t seem to make sense, but I think that this would have to be a much longer and more dense book for every characters actions to make sense to the reader. Overall, fantastic book—before I was even 1/5 of the way through it, I was sad for it eventually to be over.

Content Warnings