horchata 's review for:

Winter in Sokcho by Elisa Shua Dusapin

slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

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I feel frustrated with myself that I kept wanting something to happen, to get answers. Books like these are tone poems more than anything else. This one felt like a single cluster chord played with the pedal held down until the sound faded. Empty, like a gutted fish. I kept thinking the ink, the scar, the specter of sex, her fraught relationship to food and her family, the squish and slime of the octopus - something would start meaning something. Something would happen. The fugu at the end! And yet. I don’t know what I expected to receive, but I didn’t get it.