(eARC) Minbak by Ela Lee
This ARC was provided by St. Martin's Press with the SMP Early Readers. Thank you.
Pub Date: Feb 16 2027
Synopsis: A sweeping story of three generations of women who cross continents and decades to find truth, forgiveness and compassion.
Incheon, 1985. A nameless baby is born in a minbak in South Korea and vanishes nine days later.
London, 2008. When tragedy strikes, Hana faces ruin. She is forced to move her family – her teenage daughter Ada and ailing mother Youngja – into a single room with her, converting the rest of their home into a minbak, in a painful echo of her past life.
In the confined space of their shared room, there is nowhere to hide. As the past collides with the present, all three women are forced to face not only their family’s dark history, but that of an entire country.
Review: Across three generations of women, secrets and state betrayals unravel into a rocky reckoning with mixed-race identity, leaving each woman searching for a belonging the world was never built to give them.
This book reads like a study of that search. Though it moves through multiple POVs, three women center it, each navigating betrayal, deception, and a suffocation that comes not only from the world around them but from one another.
Their stories span generations and continents, from South Korea to London, and through them the novel puts into perspective how women, particularly unmarried women, women without men, women failed by men, are treated by a manufactured state of government.
And more importantly, that state's participation in another manufactured system, South Korean foreign adoption to the US. This becomes the through-line connecting all three women's lives, and it exposes how these systems turn women into instruments of failing each other.
There is a disgusting pervasive lack of autonomy from a lot of angles but that's the most captivating part of it all. This book went into so much heartbreak yet critique. You cannot help but just feel these conflicting emotions of fevered disappointment and hopelessness because agh!
My biggest gripe is the transition into the book's last quarter. I understand the need to fold in the factual, historical material is essential to what the novel is doing but the shift itself could have been smoother in my opinion.
The multiple POVs: I didn't mind them structurally, but some voices are simply stronger than others, and I think the sequencing could've been handled differently.
Throughout the book we're given missing pieces meant to come together, and while each additional POV does deepen the context, the abruptness of the switches sometimes didn't do justice in explaining certain things, you don't always get to spend enough time with a character before you're pulled away.
BECAUSE TRUST ME, I WANTED TO KNOW MORE. What happened to the relationship? HANA? ADA? YOUNGJA? But especially Hana, WOW! One of those most complex characters I've read in a while. Cold, dismissive, concealed. And Ada? My, what a heartbreakingly beautiful contrast. The daughter navigating this in-between, two worlds unknown to her, yet caring such a tenderness.
The prose is beautifully rich throughout. It was a pleasure to be immersed into South Korean culture.