Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

Amy  

historical fiction

Pachinko described the lives of four generations of a Korean family from the early 1900s through the late 1900s. This popular novel had an extremely slow start and ramping up period.  The third person narrative was very matter-of-fact and the characters were flat at the beginning.  The people were traditional in manner, followed the rules and traditions, and the story was, frankly, boring.  Thankfully, the novel got more interesting as the story moved along the timeline and the more modern characters became developed.  I began to care about a few of them which kept me reading.

I had not known anything about Korean history nor about the lives of struggling Koreans who fled to Japan where they were treated terribly. Then, even if their descendants were born in Japan, the children were not considered Japanese citizens.  Japan’s and Korea's histories were provided as a backdrop and I appreciated how Min Jin Lee gave the reader a good idea of the political and social environments in a way that the story kept moving along smoothly.  I’ve seen plenty of authors fail to do this successfully when they slid into “textbook mode” to give a history lesson.

However, some of the sections were still tedious and the book’s pacing was much slower than I like. Despite that, it provided an intriguing view into the lives of 20^th century Koreans and taught me a lot I hadn’t known. I admired the characters’ family loyalty, strong work ethic, and resilience.

The audiobook was narrated by Allison Hiroto.  The material was fairly dry and so was her delivery.   I wouldn’t go so far as to say she sounded robotic, but she also wasn’t overly animated.  She didn’t have many different voices and dialogues were sometimes difficult to follow because of that. I’ll give her a B-.