Choppy, uneven---those are the terms that come to mind after reading EVERYTHING BELONGS TO US. So much potential for an intriguing story, but then it devolves into an ordinary 'love gone astray' melodrama...
The author presents South Korea in the late 1970s, using a rich girl, a poor girl, and a well-off young man to examine the social inequalities that churned below the surface. Shortly before the country's leader was assassinated, actually, and doesn't that sound like a tale filled with potential for conflict?
That is not the story that Ms. Wuertz chooses to tell. Instead, she uses the social issues to paint the backdrop of what is a very ordinary story of young people meeting at university, falling in love, and then falling out of love. Think love triangle sort of thing, with financial incentives looming ahead.
It was hard to read the book through because it dragged in places. The prose is elegant, but the storytelling ability needs a bit more work.
Tuesday, January 10, 2017
My Husband's Wife: A Book Review
How to review a book featuring thoroughly unlikeable characters interacting in ways that don't seem quite plausible but feel contrived, for the purpose of moving the narrative in the direction desired by the author...
One of the characters appears first as a child of nine, and ends up a bit of a sociopath but the develpmental trajectory isn't there. Nothing beyond a bit of bullying, and the author telling rather than showing the creation of a woman unhinged. As for the stars of the novel, Lily and Ed, their relationship exists because the author wants it to exist. In real life, two such disagreeable creatures would have divorced almost immediately after their marriage, with Lily so sure that her new husband still has a thing for his previous lover. Move on and get on with it, you want to shout, but instead they remain united, endlessly bickering. Just saying that Lily still loves Ed doesn't work unless something happens to show that love, but theres's not much showing in MY HUSBAND'S WIFE.
This is the sort of thing that I can't honestly rate because I don't care for the genre and this particular offering did not draw my interest. I'll leave it to others to judge if MY HUSBAND'S WIFE meets the requirements for engaging psychological thriller-ness. As for me, I plodded along, not really caring who did what to whom, all the way through to the ending.
And I only carried on to the end because I received a free copy from Penguin Random House in exchange for a review, and I wanted to meet expectations.
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