A review by bluejayreads
Folklorn by Angela Mi Young Hur

4.75

I have been in a reading slump for a while, but this book was so much that I devoured it in two days. I say "so much" because despite it not being unreasonably long, it is unreasonably packed with everything. The narrative slips easily between past and present, real and myth, winding together concrete reality, fantasy, and folklore in a way that somehow makes myths, ghosts, and generational curses feel exactly as real and plausible as the experimental physics the protagonist studies. It's a narrator going mad and holding conversations with the hallucinations only she can see, and it's a narrator weaving stories with reality to unravel her family's past and present. It's about the immigrant experience - leaving and loss and regretting, starting over, pain and isolation and hopes and dreams and racism and being visibly Other how each individual deals with it. It's about complicated and painful family dynamics and confronting them as an adult when everyone who formed or was formed by those dynamics has changed or gone. It's about the power of story and the power of language and what translation does and doesn't do. It's about identity and origin and family and past and the threads that can and can't be cut between our present and our history. This book is so much, it feels expansive and raw and real and amazingly grounded and true, despite all the fantastical elements. It is definitely a unique reading experience but so, so worth it.