A review by barareads
The Picture Bride by Lee Geum-yi

3.0

i’d been reading this book for so long omg… the whole month i was experiencing a huge reading slump and when i began to read this thing, i was sure that it was going to prevent it from becoming so long, but it couldn’t. i’m really happy that it didn’t turn out to be a yn novel because i hate those… but also… the thing is that it’s written like a yn novel - i’m talking about the very simplistic writing style lacking any literate beauty or something.. it’s very basic… so the writing style like this plus a total absence of any cool or surprising plot twists or a romantic plot made this book incredibly boring to read. i was constantly thinking about when that amazing friendship plot that was stated as a main topic of the book would start already but apparently it’s been there all along and that just means it wasn’t anything special at all. the relationship between there main female characters is described so plainly and in such an unemotional manner - or rather in a manner that doesn’t bring out any emotion in the reader - that i was disappointed. duh. but! why 3 stars? well. i do like books that talk about long periods of the characters life, and i do like stories about women who get screwed over - because that’s what happens to women all the time - but who try to manage their lives and reach some level of independence… but more than anything else this story works as a tale about immigrants, which i guess is its real main selling point which might have been advertised but i didn’t know about it. but yeah, the immigrant struggles, the falling out with your old friends because of politics, the concept of the opposition getting divided and wasting energy on infighting instead of uniting around real problems… that last one especially but all those things hit close to home for me. again, i have to say that it’s all really simple and kinda shallow because this book is written like a yn novel lol without all the fun and silly yn novel tropes. but i like it fine exactly because i probably couldn’t have read about all those topics that this book is good at addressing were they described more seriously or like historically etc because i’m not good at reading about politics and stuff. so coincidentally it was just right for me. anyway, meh.