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A review by raf08
The Red Palace by June Hur 허주은
sad
medium-paced
3.0
Fear had never felt so tiring as it did today;
I had stepped into a world that seemed to be hiding terrible secrets from me.
Father frightened me more than a tiger. A tiger might eat me, but Father could crush my very soul.
“It seems there is always someone in the family determined to drive us mad.”
I hope your mother will love you one day, I wanted to whisper to the child. More than my own ever did.
The fabric still held his warmth, offering me a strange sort of comfort.
I’d always felt older than my years until today.
His Majesty’s words were cutting—just like my own father’s, so similarly heavy with disappointment that my chest tightened and a flash of heat seared my back.
Fathers were terrifying.
Three different points that offered different threads of one story, the pulse like a language of its own.
the weight of my home on my shoulders.
A wound that made me feel so helpless I wanted to run away from it—but I was her daughter. We were family.
“After Father’s death, I realized that everything we hold dear can be taken from us, except for one thing: the lessons learned. The things Father has taught me.”
“I would have gladly traded my life for hers.”
It was a pain that could not be performed—I had seen it too often in the eyes of the dying, and those left behind.
And being with Eojin slipped unwanted shadows into my head, dreams of what that might feel like—to be cherished,
She does not know how to love. It does not mean that she does not love at all.
But perhaps this was what the killer had once believed, too—until they had lost the most precious thing in their life. I wondered what that might be for me. What it might take for me to end the life of another.
My heart ached around the empty hole Father had left behind. He’d taken my dream, my everything.
“Perhaps we both didn’t think it possible,” I said, “that a woman could be so cruel. Perhaps when she was born, her mother dreamt of dragons, too.”
The more urgent a circumstance, Nurse Jeongsu had drilled into us, the calmer we must be.
wishing I could tuck him safely under my rib cage, protected under my bones and next to my heart, no matter what happened to me.
I prayed he wouldn’t become one more person I would need to remember.
I had parted ways with him as daughter and father … but perhaps we could come together as uinyeo and patient.