Hoonie marries Yangjin and they have a daughter. From the get, there’s something a little miraculous about Lee’s main characters in their extreme work ethic, patience, and tenacity. His family is comparatively well-off, but poor and struggling. Pachinko begins with Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910 when Hoonie is working in his family’s boardinghouse. Lee knows how to draw a reader in! Hoonie’s introduction is a short nine pages, but sets the novel’s tone. However, with the frequency of time jumps and so many characters to analyze, everyone is left a little thin-except Sunja, the only character given a key role in each generation. Every few chapters, the narration shifts to follow a different character and the narrator’s voice remains coolly removed throughout. The characters are engineered so that a reader can’t help rooting for them even though the book’s pace and structure keep the reader at a distance. Pachinko by Min Jin Lee is an ambitious book that follows four generations of Korean immigrants in Japan. New strategy for 2018: Start with the long books.
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