Tag Archives: historical

Pachinko
by Min Jin Lee
4 stars

Pachinko is a big, sprawling novel about three generations in twentieth-century Japan and Korea in which author Lee writes about love, family, and loss while focusing on the overlooked history of discrimination of the Koreans living in Japan who are perpetually seen as outsiders.

The story begins with Hoonie who is born in Korea after Japan annexes Korea in 1910 and follows his wife, Yanglin, and his beloved daughter, Sunja. Sunja (17) is seduced by a much older married man, named Koh Hansu, who is a gangster. Sunja becomes pregnant and refuses to be Hansu’s mistress and marries a kind minister named Baek Isak who brings up their son, Noa, as his own. Isak takes a position in Osaka, Japan. But Hansu follows his illegitimate son and Sunja throughout the years continuing to affect and influence their lives. Sunja and Isak have a second son, named Mozasu who ends up working in Pachinko parlor which is where the author gets her title from. The story takes you forward over 80 years! If you didn’t know, pachinko is a mechanical gambling machine and as the author explains with the climate of prejudice against the Koreans meant they had only a few ways to make a living and pachinko provided a lucrative means to a livelihood. Highly recommend! Very hard to not look at the parallels to our current American discussion on discrimination.

Read-alikes

The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck

Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang

Early Warning by Jane Smiley

To the Bright Edge of the World
by Eowyn Ivey
4 stars

Eowyn Ivey, writes again about her native Alaskan state, taking the reader on a gripping tale of a real-life historical military expedition set in the Alaska Territory in 1885. The story is about Colonel Allen Forrester who has been asked by the U.S. government to travel along the Wolverine River and survey the surrounding land and the local native tribes while his pregnant wife, Sophie, has stayed behind in Vancouver. The book starts out with Colonel Forrester’s great grandnephew giving all of the expedition papers, which are private diaries, journal entries, military reports, personal letters, sketches, and small objects to a museum curator. As the story unfolds, the reader is transported to the beautiful sights and sounds of this harsh environment in which the expedition encounters in this epic adventure story. They encounter some “downright fantastical” events leaving the reader wondering about their sanity. Meanwhile, Sophie, his wife, explores her world by learning photography and learns how to escape social norms that go with the rigid boundaries of being a women in a man’s world. I thought the book was so well researched you felt like a character in the book walking alongside the expedition. Great unexpected twist at the end.

Read-alikes

Under a Pole Star by Stef Penney

Letters from Yellowstone by Diane Smith

Green Alaska: Dreams from the Far Coast by Nancy Lord

Orhan’s Inheritance
by Aline Ohanesian
4 stars

In her debut novel, Aline Ohanesian magnificently draws us a story that is brutal and heartbreaking, yet is a story of courage, love and family secrets. The story begins in 1990, set in Anatolia, a region of Turkey, when Orhan’s grandfather Kemal is found dead, submerged in a vat of dye. Kemal is the owner of a successful business making kilim rugs. Orhan inherits the business, but his beloved grandfather has left the family home to a 90-year-old women named Seda in an Armenian nursing home in Los Angeles. Orhan goes to Los Angeles to learn why his grandfather did this and hopefully what her relationship was with his grandfather. Orhan slowly gets Seda to tell him her story about the Armenian Genocide that took place in 1915 when the Armenian Christians were forced from their homes and massacred by the Turks in which Seda survived. Ohanesian navigates the reader through the past and future until each character is unveiled. I had no knowledge of the Armenian Genocide during WWI until I read this book and was surprised that this was not covered in any of my history classes. I highly recommend this book, although it does have some violence and sexual content and is hard to read at times.

Read-alikes

The Gendarme by Mark Mustian

The Sandcastle Girls by Chris Bohjalian

The Storyteller by Jodi Picoult