Bookish Thoughts

I have to admit that I was a little wary coming into this book. Sure, everyone loved it. It's been recommended to me countless times. But I'm used to family sagas being a lot longer than this. I'm used to authors spending at least 500 pages with three, maybe four generations of a single family. To follow a family for eight generations? And to do it in 300 pages? I worried that the book would jump too much, that I'd be bitter about not spending more time with some of the characters. I shouldn't have worried, really. It took a couple of chapters to adjust my expectations. This isn't a typical family saga so much as it is a series of short stories, or even vignettes, connected because they're all about people who share blood. By the end of the book, the individual chapters have built up something much greater than the sum of it's parts: a sweeping family epic that illuminates how British colonialism and the slave trade continue to have ripple effects toda...

I love a good epic family saga. Especially one that deals with an area of the world or a part of history that I'm not all the familiar with. By watching a large cast of characters interact with and be affected by real historical events, I gain a better understanding of those events. I also have an easier time remembering all the people and dates when I have an emotional story to hang them on. Pachinko  tells the story of a family of Korean immigrants to Japan. The story begins when teenaged Sunja finds herself pregnant by a married man. In order to save face, she marries a minister who is passing through town on his way to Japan, where his brother lives. The book follows the ups and downs of this family of immigrants who do what they can to survive and even thrive in a country that doesn't want them when they have no home to go back to, Before reading this book I had only a passing familiarity with the animosity between Koreans and Japanese. This book helps lay out all the ...