Reviews

I spent a long time with this book, longer than I anticipated as I was transitioning back to working in the office after having worked from home for the past two years. Still, this book was there for me mostly during my train ride commutes home after long days of work and man! Did this book make the 40 minute train journey go by so much faster every time I picked it up.

While I don't intend to go super in depth with this review (since... well I don't really write reviews like that LOL), I just want to talk about how much I enjoyed reading this book and being able to live with such an interesting cast of characters. Though, I guess there are some spoilers maybe?

I'm always a fan of historical fiction, and June Hur's books are something I've been finding myself really enjoying, especially since she captures Korean history in such vivid ways that it always keeps me wanting for more. Seol as a character was, in the beginning, kind of annoying for me I'll be honest. But she grew on me relatively quick, as I saw her journey through an unjust and rigid class system and how much past events in her life shaped her character by the end of the story, I felt like she was a very strong protagonist, one that I often found myself thinking about even after putting the book down.

This might just be a me thing, but the constant back and forth in trying to figure out if Inspector Han really was Seol's older brother was confusing me, but it tied up really nicely in the end. I mean, I tried to really think if it made sense to completely shed or hide your identity from an estranged sibling, or one you thought was dead, and at first I thought it was nonsense. Wouldn't you recognize your sibling or family right away? But even then, the more I thought about, I realized that it could most likely happen. Loving and caring family, and even longtime friends, can and will do things if it means protecting their loved ones. From the moment I realized that they truly could be related, everything else just made so much more sense to me.

The last thing I want to talk about before I end this review is that the details of both the setting and what atrocities of the murders were so vivid. Having finished the book right before bed last night, the image of murder victims with their noses cut off was kind of haunting, not gonna lie. And it's those vivid and (somewhat) shocking details that really make me remember a book, so yeah I guess I'm always going to be thinking about that then! Anyway, I'd love to re-read this book again with the context I have now, because that's the beauty of mystery novels. You read for the journey of discovering what happens, and then when you find out, you may as well re-read to see where those things actually were hidden all along.

On a side note, I purchased Hur's latest novel and I'm very excited to read that soon! I look forward to more reads during my weekly commutes :)