A review by mariahaskins
The Eyes Are the Best Part by Monika Kim

5.0

A masterpiece of psychological horror. This book will haunt me. Monika Kim makes the seemingly mundane pressures of everyday life - divorce, college, parents finding new partners, loneliness - and makes you feel how brutally they can squeeze a person's life and mind. Ji-won's life is being turned upside down and inside out. Her family is unraveling because her dad has left. Her mother is falling apart. The pressures of college are crushing her. There's generational trauma from her immigrant parents, haunting memories of poverty and starvation, and there's the world itself, with all its racism and sexism intruding everywhere all the time. And inside all of this is Ji-won's own mind, cracking into sharper and sharper fragments. Ji-won doesn't just break, though. She is also changing herself, turning into something and someone new, in the process. Kim beautifully captures the deteriorating, transforming relationships between parent and child, between two sisters, between friends, and between Ji-won and the world. You can feel her life, her mind, getting squeezed tighter and tighter, and her final transformation is both terrifying and darkly exhilarating.