A review by jayisreading
Almond by Won-pyung Sohn

emotional reflective medium-paced

3.5

It’s not every day you read a book from the perspective of an individual—more specifically, a boy—with Alexithymia. (Then again, it’s not every day you come across such a trait in a book either.) The protagonist, Yunjae, has such a distinct voice that’s frank and detached, but in some ways, curious, that occasionally makes you pause to think about why we do and think the things we do.

There were a couple things that threw me off about this book, though. The main one is that I’m not a huge fan of the overcoming narrative, especially when it’s as neatly packaged as the one you’ll find in this novel. It’s not that I want characters to suffer, but I also think this constant strive for normalcy is a problematic one, so it was a little disappointing to see how things wrapped up. I also can’t tell if this is just the result of the translation, but I felt the dialogue between characters were really awkward, and I couldn’t really make head or tails of the nuances of their relationships. Korean having degrees of formality in the language is really hard to translate, so I don’t entirely fault the translator for this, but I think there could have been a way to navigate this a bit better.

Almond is worth reading, especially because it is told from a unique perspective. However, I didn’t find this as heartwarming and enjoyable as others seem to have found it, but that’s likely because I wasn’t the biggest fan of how things ended.

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