please look after mom

So since I took 462 (after deleting the ones I didn't like so much) it's going to be awhile before I get that post ready.  Until then, here's another book review!

I get a shit ton of emails about books.  From Barnes & Noble, the library, several e-reader stores & some other book people not to mention the book bloggers I read.  Somewhere I read a brief synopsis about this book when it first came out and put it on my list of books to get, but then forgot about it.  I saw it at the library and picked it up again.

Normally I try not to read more than one sad book at a time.  At the same time I was reading Thirteen Reasons Why and it sounded like an overload of sadness for this hormone crazy preggo, but I did it anyway.

Park So-nyo lets go of her husband's hand at the subway station in Seoul and life is forever changed for her husband and children.  The story starts off from the perspective of Chi-hon, the eldest daughter, a novelist.  She is desperate to find her missing mother and while she's busy posting and handing out flyers everywhere she can think she's traveling back in her mind through her memories of her mother and her own childhood.  It's a bit awkward getting used to the way the story is written, but once you do the story flies by.

Reviews of the book have said that you'll never treat your mother in the same way again.  When I began reading I thought, well I can't relate because I don't think of my mother this way...as a burden, as uneducated ... but as the book changes perception I started to understand what people were saying.  I know that I love my mom.  I respect her, I am amazed by her all the time, but I understand that I don't know her as someone who isn't my mother.  Does that make any sense?  That she has secrets, dreams, that she had a life before us kids that we know nothing about.

The book was, at times, slightly confusing and I don't know if that's a product of being translated from Korean to English or if that was just the writer's style, but I loved it.  It was sad, heartbreaking and despite leaving with a sense of hope the book doesn't have your traditional happy ending.  It's not a feel good novel.  It is full of regret and remorse of things not said, not done, not shown.  And it's like Aesop's Fables.  There is a lesson within the pages.  You just have to read it.