Title: Pachinko

Author: Lee Min-Jin

Publisher: Grand Central 2017

Genre: Historical Fiction

Pages: 490

Rating: 2/5 stars

Reading Challenges: 

In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant--and that her lover is married--she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision to abandon her home, and to reject her son's powerful father, sets off a dramatic saga that will echo down through the generations.

Richly told and profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty. From bustling street markets to the halls of Japan's finest universities to the pachinko parlors of the criminal underworld, Lee's complex and passionate characters--strong, stubborn women, devoted sisters and sons, fathers shaken by moral crisis--survive and thrive against the indifferent arc of history.

Unfortunately, this one really did not work for me. Everything was so dour and bleak that I never wanted to pick this volume up. I let it languish on my nightstand for days while I read other books. I dreaded having to go back to this very serious novel. And I definitely was not a fan of the time jumps. I don’t really enjoy the “sweeping family saga” genre of books and this one fits that to a tee. The writing was very detached and void of emotion during the most intense scenes. I forced myself to finish as we had picked this one for book club., but I was not fan at all.

Next up on the TBR pile: