I haven’t read that much queer Asian lit, and this is my first set in South Korea. But instead of the queer woman’s perspective, we’re reading from the POV of her elderly, homophobic mother. The mother worries for her daughter because, as a lesbian, she won’t do the traditional thing of marrying a man and having kids, leading her mother to fear for her place in Korean society. At the same time, the mother works a gruelling job in a care home, looking after a very elderly woman with no family, who the state is content to let languish and die in understaffed care homes. The mother fights for Jen’s rights to basic respect and dignity, and I was almost glad that there was no dawning realisation that her daughter faces similar discrimination for her sexuality, as that would have felt quite contrived and not realistic of real people’s complex and, often warped, thinking. But throughout the book, living in close quarters with her daughter and her girlfriend, you do see the mother’s mindset slowly begin to shift. The daughter is part of activist rallies in support of university lecturers who have been unfairly dismissed for being gay, and seeing their mistreatment at one of these rallies begins to open the mother’s eyes. She doesn’t suddenly don a rainbow flag as a cape and join her daughter on the frontlines; her traditional values are ingrained too deeply for that, her fear for her daughter’s inability to conform overriding most possibilities of acceptance. We’re not expected to feel sorry for or empathise with the mother either. As I said, it’s no redemption arc, it’s just one portrayal of what some queer folk in South Korea go through, at odds with their conservative parents.

I don’t usually mind no speech marks in books, but for some reason here I often struggled to delineate what was speech and what was internal monologue.

Thanks to the publisher for the review copy!