A review by crow_toes
Native Speaker by Chang-rae Lee

1.0

Based on the synopsis, I was hoping for more of a politics focus than there ended up being. I struggled with this one - starting with just not connecting much with the story of rebuilding a relationship after the death of a child. Beyond that, there were a lot of themes that I didn’t find connecting satisfactorily, the characters felt flat and indistinct, and I didn’t find that the threads felt resolved in the end. I got lost in the verbose prose and found myself missing a lot of events that should have felt major - I kept going back to reread deaths and bombings to figure out what had happened.