Tag: melodrama

K-drama review: Marry My Husband

Marry My Husband poster

Unusually, I didn’t just stumble across my most recent K-drama, it was recommended by a friend. Marry My Husband (tvN 2024) is brand new to Amazon Prime and it’s a typical K-drama blend of genres. In this case, it’s a mix of saccharine romance, light sci-fi, crime thriller and workplace drama.

As is often the case, it’s impossible to explain the overall premise of this series without completely spoiling the plot of the first episode, so I will do my best and then give a big fat spoiler warning before I get into it.

When we meet Kang Ji-won (Park Min-young) she is an ordinary woman in her early 40s with gastric cancer and a mid-level corporate job at U&K Food. After almost 10 years of financially supporting her useless husband Park Min-hwan (Lee Yi-kyung from Descendants of the Sun) Ji-won has just discovered he is having an affair with her best friend Jeong Su-min (Song Ha-yoon). It is peak sad melodrama.

Then there is a major plot flip and it all lightens up. There’s a comically terrible boss, multiple love triangles, a very bitchy high school reunion and a lot of lies are told – some more transparent than others. Marry My Husband goes through a few stages, ramping up gradually from office politics to action thriller.

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Book review: Seesaw by Deborah Moggach

Seesaw book coverDeborah Moggach is one of those authors I’ve seen recommended in many places over the last 20+ years. A few of her novels have been made into films (including These Foolish Things, which became The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel) and she has written several screenplays as well. So when a family member was having a book clearout and offered me her novel Seesaw I jumped at it. I will not be jumping at her books in future.

It’s not that it’s a bad book. It’s easy to read, with complex characters and I was entertained. But it’s also fairly predictable, despite a structure that feels intended to surprise or even wrongfoot readers. And its commentary on class and money feels simplistic – very much the perspective of an upper middle class writer.

The story centres on the Price family – suburban middle-class folk with everyday, petty squabbles. They’re members of the rotary club. The younger children go to private school. They bought their oldest child a flat when he went to university and have promised him some very expensive film-editing equipment to kickstart his career. Both parents run their own businesses. They’re ordinary; dull, even.

Then their 17-year-old daughter Hannah goes missing. After a long, increasingly fraught day, the Prices receive a phone call claiming that Hannah has been kidnapped and demanding a very large ransom. They can afford it, but it’s going to clean them out of almost everything they have.

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K-drama review: Anna

Anna posterOur temporary holiday from Netflix means I have access to considerably fewer K-dramas at the moment, but there are still a few scattered between the other big streaming services. Anna (2022) started life as a web series and is currently on Amazon Prime Video in the UK. Unusually for a K-drama it’s only 8 episodes long. I didn’t even bother checking online reviews before giving it a try.

This series is most definitely at the more serious, high-quality drama end of the scale compared with a lot of other TV shows from Korea. But it didn’t drag or take itself too seriously, as I found with Misaeng.

Our main character is Lee Yu-mi (Bae Suzy – a huge Hallyu star I know mainly from Uncontrollably Fond), a young woman from a poor background who tells a lie that should have been small and insignificant but instead changes her life entirely. It also changes the tone of the show from straight drama to psychological thriller.

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K-drama review: It’s Okay to Not Be Okay

Poster of the four lead actors in It's Okay to Not Be Okay

Sometimes I need an engrossing, hyper-real, overwrought drama with plenty of romance and a little comedy, and only a K-drama will hit the spot. The previous few I watched hadn’t quite worked for me, but It’s Okay to Not Be Okay (tvN/Netflix, 2020) was just right. It’s far from a perfect show but it is very entertaining in its heightened mishmash of styles.

Our lead character is Moon Gang-tae (Kim Soo-hyun), who works as a caretaker in psychiatric wards/hospitals and lives with his brother Moon Sang-tae (Oh Jung-se, from When the Camellia Blooms) who has autism and works various low-paid jobs. They move homes and jobs frequently, which is related to Sang-tae having witnessed their mother’s murder when they were young.

Gang-tae is both sweet and very capable, but to cope with the difficulties of caring for his brother and their frequent moves, he can come across as cold and unemotional. This makes him an ideal sparring partner for Ko Moon-young (Seo Yea-ji), a popular children’s author who is brittle and quick to anger.

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K-drama review: Descendants of the Sun

From left: Captain Yoo Si-jin, Dr Kang Mo-yeong, Sergeant Seo Dae-young and Lt Yoon Myung-ju.

I know, it’s barely two weeks since my last K-drama review and this show is 16 hours long. No wonder I haven’t read much. My excuses are twofold: I was a bit brain foggy and I found this series addictive. From the first episode of Descendants of the Sun (KBS 2016), I knew I was in trouble.

After the low stakes of Coffee Prince, this drama was much more serious, but still sweet. It opens with an impressive set piece in the DMZ between North and South Korea. After soldiers from both sides of the border fight with knives in a stand-off that the public can never be told about, the triumphant leader of the South Korean commandos removes the scarf covering his face to reveal our hero: Captain Yoo Si-jin (Song Joong-ki).

Our heroine has a slightly less violent introduction but is still instantly impressive. Dr Kang Mo-yeong (Song Hye-kyo) is a surgeon at a big hospital in Seoul. She’s great at her job but keeps getting overlooked for promotions because she doesn’t have connections. She doesn’t take any shit from patients but does get on well with her colleagues and is willing to suck up to her superiors so long as it doesn’t break her moral code.

Si-jin and his best bud Sergeant Seo Dae-young (Jin Goo) are on leave and enjoying a funfair when they foil a robbery. The thief, Kim Gi-bum (Kim Min-seok, who I know from Doctors and Hello, My Twenties) is taken to hospital, with Si-jin and Dae-young in pursuit when they realise he still has one of their phones. Dr Kang initially thinks they are hoodlums harassing her patient and refuses to let them near Gi-bum (who, for reasons that I could never figure out, has as his next-of-kin Dae-young’s on-off girlfriend Lt Yoon Myung-ju – a military doctor who trained with Dr Kang). But when Gi-bum tries to run away from the hospital, he runs into a real gang and ends up being saved by Si-jin and Dae-young in the pilot’s second excellent set piece.

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She would fling these pin-pricks in the air

MyCousinRachelMy Cousin Rachel
by Daphne du Maurier

I really truly thought I had read this before and that picking it up on holiday would be a re-read, but it became increasingly clear that this was entirely new to me. It’s nice when you find a new-to-you book by a favourite author, right? This was Daphne du Maurier’s last real big success, though she wrote several more books after it, and is often held up as her greatest work (yes – even greater than Rebecca, some say).

Philip has been raised by his cousin Ambrose since he was orphaned young and together they run an estate in Cornwall. Philip is a young man, while middle-aged Ambrose has never married. Until, that is, he travels to Italy for his health and meets his distant cousin Rachel. She’s a half-Italian widow in her 30s who shares Ambrose’s love for gardens and he is soon besotted. But can she be trusted? And is naïve Philip going to be forever spoiled by knowing her?

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She thought she’d left her past behind

In Her Shadow
by Louise Douglas

I was sent this book on spec by the publisher, I’m guessing partly because it’s set in Bristol, or at least half of it is. But I must admit that I wasn’t entirely won over.

The premise sounded a bit woolly and to be honest, it was. Highly strung museum worker Hannah Brown has never get over the death of her best friend Ellen when they were 18, especially because she feels that she had betrayed her friend in some mysterious way. What appears to be a sighting of Ellen sparks off a long-drawn-out breakdown, or almost-breakdown, told in alternating chapters to the story of her childhood friendship with Ellen.

The characters are interesting and varied. As well as mousey matter-of-fact Hannah and exuberant arty Ellen there’s Ellen’s brooding, troubled father and Hannah’s sort-of-foster-brother Jago who is a gentle salt-of-the-earth type.

And there is quite a lot going on. In her youth Hannah nurtured an obsessive fixation on Ellen’s father, turning a blind eye to his failures as a father to her best friend. She also got pretty jealous over both Jago and Ellen. In the current day Hannah has a fixation on her co-worker John who is married, though not happily. And she’s having a meltdown.

Which all sounds like it could have been gripping. But somehow…it wasn’t. It was easy enough to read but there were no stand-out passages. The Bristol setting if anything annoyed me because it was slightly clunky, name-checking streets and locations constantly, rather than using more subtle descriptions that Bristolians would recognise anyway.

The Cornish setting was better, combining the romantic wild landscape and the mystery of a big rich house (Ellen’s) and the starker reality of working-class Britain in what I think was the 1970s and 1980s. Douglas showed some love for this setting, subtly dropping in local detail the way I would have liked her to in the Bristol sections.

The climactic reveal of the betrayal was actually better than I had expected, and made me dislike Hannah where up to then I had been on her side. I know the moment itself could be written off as a youthful mistake but she has spent years (16 or 17, I think) doing nothing to right the wrong.

There was some gothic, melodramatic potential for this novel but for me it didn’t deliver.

This book was kindly sent to me by the publisher in return for an honest review.

Published 2012 by Bantam Press, an imprint of Transworld Publishers.

Sometimes you shouldn’t probe too deep

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Rupture
by Simon Lelic

This was another book club read and it certainly generated a lot of discussion, even if part of that was our cynical reaction to the marketing surrounding this book – a lot of review copies were sent out and the book includes “book club” style questions at the back. I mean, it worked, we all read it!

I really enjoyed this book but I didn’t note down my thoughts on finishing it, as I usually would, because I suspected it wouldn’t stand up to intense criticism. Turns out I was right. The more questions asked around the table, the more I realised that this was a guilty pleasure rather than a class act.

The story follows policewoman Lucia May’s investigation into a school shooting. It seems to be a cut-and-dried case – teacher walked into assembly, shot and killed five people including himself – and May’s superiors urge her to wind up the investigation quickly so that the community can move on. But May wants to know not just what happened but also why, and that’s a complex question.

Lelic certainly has some skill. I was gripped by the story even though most of the facts are revealed early on. Every other chapter is a transcript of an interview from shortly after the shooting, allowing a lot of characters’ voices to be heard. Certain details are revealed in these chapters that you realise Lucia has known all along (because she conducted all the interviews) while we as readers had to wait to get to that interview, which is the opposite way round to how information in a novel usually works, and I liked that.

Without wanting to give too much away, the key theme of this book is bullying, and it wears its mission statement so plainly that the message can get heavy handed at times. Yes, bullying happens among adults as well as children and I think it’s important to acknowledge that, but I’m not sure that this book gave the most accurate portrayal. I’m also not sure how accurate Lelic’s portrayal of the police is (I’m guessing not very) though I did find the school convincing. Our discussion revealed a number of plot holes, many more than I would ever have spotted alone.

I was glad to find I was not alone in considering the killer, Samuel Szajkowski, to be the most compelling character in this book. Even though he is dead before the book begins, and there are no flashbacks, we get to know a little of him through other people and what emerges is a believable, complex man. It’s a shame that no other characters are quite so fully rounded, but then you could argue that the book is really about Szajkowski even though it follows Lucia’s daily life.

It was suggested that there is a certain element of doggedly following writing guidelines evident in this book, which is Lelic’s first novel. But while reading it I was able to completely suspend disbelief and enjoy the ride. Which is no bad thing, let’s face it.

First published 2010 by Picador.
Finalist for the Crime Writers Association John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger Award 2010.