darrin 's review for:

The Tenth Muse by Catherine Chung
5.0

I found The Tenth Muse to be an even better book than Catherine Chung's Forgotten Country and I rated that book with 5 stars too. So 6 for The Tenth Muse? Perhaps.

Being someone who likes genealogy and tracing my family history, this book held my interest right out of the gate. As Katherine's story unfolds and gets more complicated and heartbreaking the story becomes all that more interesting and surprising. I wanted to keep reading just because I wanted to figure out the mystery with Katherine. There is a point, when more revelations about Katherine's ancestry are revealed, that you realize Catherine Chung's character has familial and ancestral connections with two theaters of war, forced sexual slavery of the Japanese army, the gender preference issue in Chinese culture and, finally, the holocaust. What struck me about this was just how deftly Catherine Chung wove together this story line and it all seemed plausible and real.

First and foremost, however, this is a book about the unequal treatment of women in many cultures, in the sciences, the workplace and in education. To me, as a fifty something white male, Katherine's encounters with chauvinism and misogyny were eye opening and enlightening. It seems to me, many times, that well-written fiction has a more emotional impact on a reader than simply reading a non-fiction book about gender inequality.

This is a more skillfully constructed story, in my opinion, than Forgotten Country. I like Forgotten Country because of the Korean cultural context and my connection with it, but I also like that Catherine Chung went in a completely different direction with The Tenth Muse.