Category: Reviews

K-drama review: Twenty-five, Twenty-one

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Twenty-Five, Twenty-One poster

I occasionally like a more grounded K-drama – less glitz and designer clothes, more money troubles and friendship drama. Twenty-five, Twenty-one (TvN 2022) really hit the spot for me. It’s a coming-of-age drama that reminded me a lot of Reply 1988 – which is no bad thing.

Like the Reply series, we have two timelines. In 2021 a teenage girl, Kim Min-chae (played by Choi Myung-bin), is reluctantly attending a ballet exam. She does badly and in a pique runs off to her grandmother’s house where she find a diary of her mother’s from 1998.

Cue the story of Na Hee-do (teenager played by Kim Tae-ri, who co-starred in the excellent film The Handmaiden; adult played by Kim So-hyun, who is a major musical theatre star). Hee-do was a child prodigy in fencing but, now in her penultimate year of high school, has failed to live up to the early promise. She has developed an obsession with Korea’s top fencer Ko Yu-rim (played by Bona) – a girl her own age, also living in Seoul. When Hee-do’s school axes its fencing team due to the IMF crisis, Hee-do manoeuvres her way into Yu-rim’s school and its fencing team. But Yu-rim’s friendship is not easily won.

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Book review: Please Look After Mother by Shin Kyung-sook

please look after mother book cover

Last year I looked up recommendations of Korean literature available in translation. Not so long ago, the options were fairly few but that’s changing fast. I have multiple novels by Kyung-sook Chin on my want-to-read list and I’m happy to find I really enjoyed the first one I tried, Please Look After Mother (translated from Korean by Kim Chi-young).

The premise is simple. But the psychology and emotions are far from simple. An elderly woman, Park So-nyo, is separated from her husband in the busy crowds at a central Seoul subway station. The novel follows her family’s search for her and their gradual discoveries about this woman they thought they knew.

Chapters are told from the perspective of different members of the family in turn. Some sections are written in second person, which I don’t always get on with. And it did put me off a little to begin with, but Chin won me over.

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Book review: Sex and Lies by Leïla Slimani

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sex and lies book cover

I like essay collections but I tend to buy them at a faster rate than I read them. I fear they’re going to be less gripping than a novel or deal with serious subjects with less levity than fiction usually adds. Neither of which was a problem with Sex and Lies by Leïla Slimani (translated from French by Sophie Lewis).

I first heard about Slimani when her her novel Lullaby was published in English in 2018 and everyone was recommending it. I took one look at the synopsis and decided it was far too dark for me. That novel won Slimani the Prix Goncourt, making her the first Moroccan woman to do so. But it was actually her previous novel Adèle that triggered the conversations that led to Sex and Lies.

Adèle is about a woman living with sex addiction. When it came out in France, there was publicly expressed surprise that a Moroccan woman could have written on that topic, or indeed anything related to sex. Slimani didn’t set out to be shocking or controversial. She was after all following a centuries-old tradition of Arabic-authored literature that is frank about sex. But she acknowledges that in recent decades, things have changed on that front in her native country.

On her two-week Moroccan book tour for Adèle Slimani found that women and young people were keen to discuss sexual topics. But the conversations kept turning to the lack of freedom in modern Morocco. So she kept the conversations going, meeting people – mostly women – who were willing to be interviewed, albeit anonymously for the most part.

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Book review: The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem

The Book of Disappearance

Of the Palestinian books I’ve read in recent years, The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem is possibly the most educational, yet is also highly entertaining.

Alaa and Ariel are friends who live in the same building in Tel Aviv. They hang out most evenings, work in similar jobs and have friendly disagreements about the history of their city. But then one day Alaa disappears without warning – along with all the other Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied Territories. Ariel must now confront how well he knew his friend, and how he feels about Palestinians in general.

The narrative skips between Ariel’s story and excerpts from Alaa’s diary. In between are vignettes about how other non-Arab Israelis are affected by the disappearance of the Palestinians. From a farmer wondering why none of his day labourers have turned up, to a patient whose surgery is cancelled because the surgeon hasn’t come to work, at first the rumour is that “the Arabs” are on strike.

But how can four million people have just disappeared? Rumours swirl, security alerts are raised, official statements from the Knesset and IDF top brass are minimal.

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K-drama review: Tastefully Yours

Tastefully Yours screenshot

Sometimes I need my TV to be simple, warm and cosy. And what could be more cosy than the setting of a small-town restaurant with storylines about found family and sweet romance? That’s the vibe of Tastefully Yours (ENA 2025) – mostly. Unusually short for a K-drama (10 episodes of one hour each) the story gets to the point without repeating itself and ends satisfactorily.

Han Beom-woo (played by Kang Ha-neul from When the Camellia Blooms and Misaeng) is an executive at Hansang, “Korea’s top food conglomerate”, and is head of a one-star restaurant in Seoul called Motto. He’s a money guy, with no interest in the restaurants that he invests in, and therefore no qualms about destroying small businesses when they no longer serve his needs. His brother Han Seon-woo runs a two-star restaurant in Seoul also owned by Hansang.

Hansang’s founder and president is Beom-woo’s mother, who plays her two sons against each other, ruthlessly demanding the near-impossible and showing so little warmth it’s hard to believe these three people are meant to be related to each other. What is clear is the pressure both sons are under to get three stars by any means necessary.

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K-drama review: The King, Eternal Monarch

The King Eternal Monarch posterI watched The King, Eternal Monarch (SBS 2020) based on an online recommendation. Like most K-dramas it is enormously long (16 episodes that are 80 minutes each) and I watched it over a few months. I enjoyed it but I definitely have reservations and…questions.

This is a fantasy series based in two parallel worlds: one that’s essentially our modern reality and one where Korea – or rather, Corea – is still ruled by a monarchy. The king of Corea, Lee Gon (played by Lee Min-ho of Boys Over Flowers, Legend of the Blue Sea and many other shows), is a curious mix of modern and traditional. He lives in a large palace in Busan, waited on by subservient staff. He has fancy ceremonial robes and spends his free time practising fencing and riding his beloved horse. But it gradually becomes clear this is also a world with cars, mobile phones, internet and all the other familiar aspects of modern life.

In the first episode we see a flashback to 1994 when Lee Gon witnessed his uncle Lee Lim (Lee Jung-jin) murder his father in an attempt to seize the throne. Lee Gon was saved by a masked stranger, making him the new monarch at just six years old. The masked stranger disappeared, leaving behind a mysterious ID card. The card belongs to a Detective Jeong Tae-eul and was issued in 2019 – 25 years in the future.

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Book review: The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara

the people in the trees book cover

I have had The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara on my to-read list since it was published more than 10 years ago. It was her first novel, before the worldwide phenomenon that was her follow-up A Little Life. Which I read and loved, but it is devastating, and I think that made me delay reading more from her. And it has to be said that this book also deals with heavy, shocking themes. I think it’s brilliant, but it is not an easy read.

On the first page we are told that the main character, Dr Norton Perina, has been arrested and charged with rape, statutory rape, sexual assault and endangering a minor. What follows is his protege Ronald Kubodera’s attempt to exonerate him, wrapped around Perina’s memoir written from prison. Kubodera does not claim the offences didn’t happen. He thinks everything Perina has done is justified. It is an unsettling angle from which to approach the story. And it is also extremely clever, because it allows Yanagihara to show both the full extent of Perina’s awfulness and the fact that he truly did not see any problem with his own actions.

Perina is an American doctor who, we are told, won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1974 for discovering a medical condition that retards ageing. This condition existed only in a remote tribe in a Micronesian island country called U’ivu. We also learn that over a period of decades, Perina adopted 43 children from U’ivu and raised them in the US. It isn’t hard to connect the dots between the facts revealed in the first two pages, but the full horror isn’t revealed until near the end of the novel’s 360 pages.

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Book review: What We Left Behind by Robin Talley

what we left behind book cover

Robin Talley is a pretty big name in YA fiction. What We Left Behind is the second of her books I have read (after Lies We Tell Ourselves) and the second slight disappointment. It’s kinda sweet and fun but definitely suffered from a few problems that mean I can’t recommend it to the young people who really need the book this could have been.

Toni and Gretchen have been a solid couple for years at high school, remarkably free from homophobia despite being out lesbians. They had planned to go to Harvard together but Gretchen has a secret: she also got into New York University and intends to go there instead. She grew up in New York City and misses it. She waits to break the news until days before term starts. It doesn’t go down well with Toni but they’ve never fought before, why start now? And NYC isn’t all that far from Cambridge, Massachusetts.

But reality quickly hits. The work is hard, harder than they feared. Toni immediately takes on a bunch of extracurricular responsibilities that take up even more time than schoolwork. They both make new friends who expand their worlds in…interesting ways. And their relationship suffers.

Toni meets some trans and nonbinary students and realises that there might be a reason this group is such a draw. Toni was already thinking about gender a lot – to the degree of not using pronouns for anyone. Which is a weird tic to be honest. But I understand where it’s coming from and that it’s part of Toni’s genderqueer journey. Toni also hasn’t really forgiven Gretchen and keeps cancelling their planned weekend visits.

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Book review: Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

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Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow book cover

Preconceptions and assumptions can be dangerous, or at least misleading. I thought Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin was time-travel SF – I guess I didn’t recognise the Shakespeare reference. But perhaps if I had, I’d have expected something very heavy and “worthy”, and might not ever have read it. Which would have been a true shame as this is a gorgeous novel.

Sam and Sadie first meet in the 1980s as 10-year-olds in an LA hospital and bond by playing computer games. Sam is a patient; Sadie’s sister is a patient. For a while they’re best friends, until an argument leads to them not speaking.

Years later while at university they meet in a train station in Boston, where they are both studying. They gradually grow to be close friends again but old habits die hard and failing to tell each other the whole truth leads to years of misunderstandings and resentments.

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K-drama review: Just Between Lovers

Just Between Lovers poster

The drama Just Between Lovers (JTBC 2017–2018), also known as Rain or Shine, is at the more serious end of the K-dramas I have watched. I really enjoyed it despite not having expected something with this tone.

The story’s background is loosely based on the real-life disaster in 1995 when Sampoong Department Store in Seoul collapsed. In reality 502 people were killed and 937 injured. In the TV show, the collapse of the fictional S-Mall kills 48 people and the drama focuses on two of the survivors 10 years later.

Lee Kang-doo (played by Lee Jun-ho) and Ha Moon-soo (Won Jin-ah) both lost a family member when S-Mall collapsed and they are still dealing with grief as well as their own trauma. Kang-doo was badly injured in the disaster and still struggles with physical pain as well as nightmares about the time he spent trapped in the rubble. He works in temporary construction jobs. He acts tough but is sweet at his core.

Moon-soo has trained as an architect specializing in safety regulations. She has her life together but suffers from her mother’s alcoholism. And though she has lost much of her memory from the day S-Mall collapsed, it still haunts her. She’s practical and not easily phased.

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