acogna 's review for:

The God and the Gumiho by Sophie Kim

3.0

adventurous emotional funny medium-paced

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An enjoyable read that I basically asked from within the delirious haze of my KPop Demon Hunters crashout. I'll throw it a bone and say that it's cute, but only once the main conflict revs up and actually gives us focus. Without a plot to give it foundation (really, even sometimes within the plot when it has foundation), this book was too… corny for me? That's not a fault of the book for being what it is, it's very self-aware of its romantasy-esque cheese, which is why I'm not really digging my claws into it as much as I would other books of this genre, but this all but confirmed that I've outgrown this genre of novel, and that my preferences have shifted over the years. I would have loved this, if it came out a couple of years earlier than when I finished it.

I don't consider the story being 'predictable' a flaw (a predictable story does not mean a bad one), but you can see where the book started off with the pitch of 'mythological fantasy investigation-style police procedural with grumpy-and-sunshine set in contemporary South Korea' and then the narrative informed itself on that alone, instead off the want to do any kind of organic storytelling based off that pitch. It's a typical romantasy flaw, that reliance on tropes as storytelling beats instead of storytelling beats applying tropes, but I've just come to accept it as an exasperating hallmark of such a juvenile genre.

But hey, it wasn't a bad time!