This was an incredible read that I will be thinking about for some time. Neutrinos and graduate study and Korean identity as immigrants or international adoptees and folklore and trauma and stories and family and so, so much. I loved it. ( )

The trauma of being other piled on the trauma of immigration is leavened by the wonder of physics and folktales, language and connection. We follow Elsa from days in Antarctica to days in Sweden to months in Glendale, and those months are long and dark, muggy with unresolved feeling and family. This heavy ground is not got over lightly and almost bogs the novel down, but the release is intensely felt and the return to Sweden feels like spring. ( )

Angela Mi Young Hur's Folklorn offers a multi-layered narrative that combines a thread of folk tale/fantasy with and examination of family structure and cultural identity. This might make Folklorn sound weighty in an uncomfortable way, but that is not the case. Folklorn pulls the reader in almost immediately with an opening at an Antarctic research station where Elsa Park, a Korean-American physicist, suddenly finds herself crossing paths with an imaginary childhood friend.

After this opening, the novel moves back and forth across time and across geography. Readers spend time in Elsa's childhood home in Los Angeles, during Elsa's past and the present-day, watch the struggles of her family—mother, father, and brother—to live up to the different roles imposed on them due to gender, ethnicity and class. The setting moves between Los Angeles and Sweden, where Elsa is completing a post-doc.

The encounter with her imaginary brings Elsa back to the fables told by her mother, which were accompanied by warnings of a generational curse. Trying to understand what these fables may mean in terms of both mythos and her own life, Elsa gradually becomes friends with Oskar, a Korean War refugee adopted by a Swedish family who now serves on the faculty of Asian languages and literature. As Elsa wrestles with myth, Oskar navigates a strange territory of his own—he's fluent in Korean, culturally Swedish, but not fully a member of either society.

Given the range of topics the novel touches on, this brief synopsis omits more than it includes. Every relationship in the novel is complex, shaped by past and present and multiple cultural forces. But, as I observed above, Folklorn is never uncomfortably weighty. It's a novel propelled forward by strong characters and sudden events, both of which make it hard to put down.

Folklorn will introduce readers to aspects of Korean history and folklore, to the community of particle physicists, to the dis-eases lying beneath Swedish culture, to the ways family identity can become a force to struggle against. Pick this title up and let yourself enter it. You'll be dazzled, fascinated, and troubled by the journey it takes you on.

I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via EdelweissPlus; the opinions are my own. ( )