Jeong You Jeong

* I would like to thank NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to review this book. *

Yu-Jin, a high school student who suffers from debilitating seizures, wakes one morning to a metallic smell, and finds blood everywhere. He soon makes a grisly find; the body of his murdered mother. Clearly there has been a horrendous event in the house the night before, and Yu-Jin has no memory of it at all.

As he tries to piece together what happened, Yu-Jin starts to wonder if somehow he is the villain of the piece. Several discoveries he makes lead him to question almost everything about his past and to paint his problematic relationships with his mother and his psychotherapist Auntie in a very different light from what he thought.

You-Jeong Jeong spins a complex plot that metaphorically unpeels layers of the onion to give us a deeper understanding of Yu-Jin and his past. There are some clever twists to the plot, although a couple of them are telegraphed a bit too clearly. This is a very good thriller, all the same.… (meer)

Sowon's father is awaiting execution for mass murder. Seven years previously, when he was a security guard at a massive dam, he opened the sluices and flooded the village below, killing many. Sowon was a young boy at the time, and his father's actions have haunted him since, resulting in his being ostracized wherever he went. Now, on the verge of adulthood, he wants to understand why his father took the actions he did.

This is the second novel I have read by this South Korean writer, and once again this was an enthralling read. While it is essentially a crime novel, it is also an excellent novel about a dysfunctional family and some of the societal ills besetting contemporary South Korea. The book is beautifully plotted, moving seamlessly between the events leading up to the crime, and the present day as Sowon tries to make sense of the crime, as well as relating the events of his life between the time of the crime and the present day.

Recommended.
3 1/2 stars… (meer)

[Spoilers] Wow. Really did not like this one. I listened to it, and I ended up playing on 2x speed so I could finish it because I hate not knowing how a plot turns out and kept hoping it would get better. I did not like the audio narrator, but it was much more than that. The gruesome killing of women didn't help either. But most of all, there was nothing for me to hold onto in the story and make me care. The twists were predictable. The protagonist was unlikeable and not complex enough to be interesting. As for the end, it would have been better if he had drowned.… (meer)