Reviews with content warning for Sexual assault - I'll Be Right There

if the word 'wistful' was a book, it'd be this one. there's not much plot, and it took me some time to get into the story, but oh does it hurt to suddenly have it all end AND NEVER be able to experience this for the first time again.

a couple of songs by YOONA to listen to while reading this book: 'When The Wind Blows' & 'To You'

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linlinlin's review

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challenging emotional inspiring reflective sad slow-paced

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

5.0

finished this and decided to go off my ssris

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julieshuff's review

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challenging dark mysterious tense medium-paced

3.0

I’m really conflicted about this book. There were times I thought it was a two star books and times I was almost in tears about how atmospheric it was.

Content warnings of sexual assault and eating disorders for anyone thinking about reading this book.

Things I liked:
-the super wide ranging references. I’m sure I didn’t get all of the literary references but reading about Fallingwater, Peru, or quoting a French/Uruguayan poet kept things interesting.
-I liked the alternating POV.
-even in translation, it was beautifully written.

Things I didn’t like:
- I couldn’t follow some of the time lapses. Hard to tell what the timeline was the way it jumped around.
- pretty sure all of the male characters (except for maybe professor Yoon) are emotionally stunted.
-strange conception of what constitutes romantic attraction. Jung Yoon is basically sexually assaulted by her childhood friend Dahn when she goes to visit him during his enlistment and it is never dealt with or unpacked or viewed in a negative light. Separately, Myungsah can’t commit and is basically gaslighting her giving her reasons they can’t be together or lack of clear answers.
-overly dark-people dying left and right in odd circumstances (which was maybe a point)

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brogan7's review

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character

3.5

This book is hard to categorize. It is bleak in so many ways. The language itself is bleak (perhaps because in translation)--flat.
In spite of this, I did care about the characters and I wanted to follow the story, except that it keeps moving in such tight circles, (the chronology is endlessly mixed up)--instead of enchanting I found this narrative structure dizzying and eventually boring.

I think the author had a lot to say...that the Korea she is writing about is a broken Korea....and that means that its people are broken, too.

I couldn't tell sometimes if the story she is telling is wishful thinking...you know books have those moments in them where it's more fantasy than reality? And it felt like that, only perhaps because of certain cultural and literary conventions, the fantasies weren't familiar to me? (The descriptions of the landscape and snow-laden trees, the

tragic/ impossible/unconsummated <\spoiler> love story, even the way she writes about the cat, as though it's a mannequin of a cat and not a real cat? The way you might write about a cat if you'd never had one, or write about a child if you'd only ever had a doll.)
I found these elements confusing and not all that pleasant, but I think that may be culture clash, and so I find them kind of interesting even if they didn't feel good.

And then there were details I loved so well, like the story of St Christopher, and this line right near the very end:
"Whenever I find myself in one of those moments where the past seems to be repeating itself in the present, I stop thinking of time as moving in a straight line." (p.307)

The narrative certainly doesn't move time forward in a straight line. The sad part is, it does move inexorably towards a kind of melancholy nostalgia in which the past is romanticized but never really was that great, and in which the present is full of grief and disappointment.

I've heard it's hard to like a book when you don't like the protagonist, but it's also hard to like a book when the setting is so emotionally ruinous.

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