sarangeureo 's review for:

Shoko's Smile by Choi Eunyoung

3.0

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my favourite short story from the book definitely goes to 'hanji and youngju'. in the story, the narrator, a young korean woman, develops an intense friendship with a kenyan man she meets while both are volunteering at a monastery in france. at some point, their relationship goes wrong, and he stops speaking to her. but despite the narrator’s best efforts, she cannot figure out the cause of their estrangement, what she might have said or done to upset or offend her friend. the reader can’t, either. instead, we are left with the gut-punch of that lost intimacy and no tidy way to reassure ourselves that the same thing wouldn’t happen to us under comparable circumstances (washington independent, 2021)

reference: https://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/index.php/bookreview/shokos-smile-stories