A moving and meditative account of the crushing demands of Korean careerism.
In Jeong’s novel, a group of recent Korean college graduates navigate the unyielding competitiveness that permeates both professional and personal life.
Youngbaek Kim has much to be proud of—after he graduates from the prestigious Sky University, he lands a job at Corporation P, the second biggest company in Korea. However, he is plagued by discontent; he studied philosophy in college and feels stymied by the tediously banal routines of office life. Also, he constantly frets about money—it seems impossible that he will ever save enough to buy a home that others will be impressed by, and he fecklessly tries his hand at investment. His friends, Dongjoo Lee and Inyoung Choi, both seem much happier and much better positioned to win the endless rat race that dominates their lives. Dongjoo Lee is a programmer at the top corporation in Korea and handsomely compensated, while Inyoung Choi has a job in the civil service, a position coveted for its stability. However, they are both just as anxious about the future as Youngbaek, and as envious of him as he is of them. The author artfully depicts the Korean obsession with success and a society that strictly separates winners and losers through a process of “verification.” “Verification became a source of envy with everyone trying to take the successes of those around them and spin them as their own. It is high school all over again, with students using Photoshop to falsify their college entrance exam scores to receive verification from the community.” Youngbaek sees a chance at happiness when he becomes engaged to Jungyoon, a woman with whom he falls deeply in love—but her mother talks her out of it, convincing her that she and Youngbaek “just aren’t in the same league,” and that she can find someone with better financial prospects.
Jeong’s tale is impressively thoughtful—he reflects, with great clarity, on the ways in which Korea’s socioeconomic liberalization discarded one prohibitive hierarchy for another. As Youngbaek observes, “There are always more stairs to climb. Stairs upon stairs upon stairs...I guess Korea’s ancient class system of endless hierarchies, has really only changed in name. It will continue to loom over me and on to future generations. Still, climbing endless stairs is different from the impossibility of climbing up a family tree.” Friendships are almost necessarily converted into rivalries, and romantic connections are reduced to opportunities for social climbing, each date conducted in a metaphorical “interrogation room.” The author’s writing has a lapidary elegance to it—he subtly creates an atmosphere of melancholy and sad inevitability, as if there is no escape from the cultural pressures of Korean life. The plot moves at an unhurried pace, which can seem excessively languorous, and there is more than a touch of adolescent melodrama in Youngbaek’s tortured angst—a self-indulgent theatricality that borders on ponderousness. Still, Jeong’s depiction of Korean life, especially as experienced by its younger generation, is marvelously meticulous and rendered with great emotional power.
A moving and meditative account of the crushing demands of Korean careerism.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2023
ISBN: 979-1198200242
Page Count: 226
Publisher: METRIC
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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