PACHINKO by Min Jin Lee

For me, this book was long and somewhat tedious.  The writing is good, and the storyline is easy to follow, but it did not affect me emotionally as deeply as it should have.  Sunja, a teenager in early 20^th century Korea, becomes pregnant by a married man.  She then marries a Christian minister, Isak, who feels compelled to help her out after her family nurses him back to health from an almost fatal bout of tuberculosis.  They join his brother and sister-in-law in Osaka, Japan, where bigotry against Koreans is the norm.  Both couples struggle to make a living, especially after Isak is imprisoned for religious/political reasons.  In some ways, this book reminds me of Unbroken, in that the Japanese come across as cruel and unreasonable.  Unfortunately, conditions in Korea become more and more horrendous as the century progresses, so that these Korean immigrants have no choice really but to stay in Japan.  Even as their success grows in the pachinko (a cross between pinball and slot machines) business, they know that obtaining a passport is practically impossible.  I felt sympathy for their plight and disdain for the Japanese government, but I never really bonded with the characters.  The men, in particular, make some bizarre decisions that I did not understand at all, especially one at the end that I found particularly disappointing.  The women, on the other hand, are salt-of-the-earth types who do the best they can under the circumstances.  They are hard-working, enterprising, and undaunted by obstacles, such as a husband’s pride.

INHERITANCE by Dani Shapiro

I did not really want to read this book and certainly did not expect to like it.  Memoirs are definitely not my thing, but my dread was quickly dispelled.  This book focuses on the author’s discovery via DNA testing that her now deceased father was not her biological father.  As Dani was much closer to her Orthodox Jewish father than to her somewhat narcissistic mother, this revelation about her paternity completely rocks her world.  The only flaw in this whole story is that Dani had loads of clues throughout her life and simply chose to disregard them.  To ignore how different her coloring and features were from her parents seems outrageous to me.  Perhaps, though, she had some subconscious doubt about her parentage that caused her to do the DNA test in the first place, albeit at the suggestion of her husband.  I loved several things about this book—the suspense, the writing, and especially the emotional wallop that it packs.  It brought tears to my eyes more than once, as Dani does some in-depth soul searching about what it means to be a daughter and to be loved.  Her conception using artificial insemination leaves her with questions that she may never be able to answer, particularly with regard to whether or not either or both parents knew that she was not her father’s biological offspring.  The book also addresses the fact that sperm banks can no longer guarantee anonymity.  Our access to DNA information is remarkable, and it can enlighten us as to where we came from; we just have to ensure that it does not redefine who we are at our core.

THE ASSOCIATION OF SMALL BOMBS by Karan Mahajan

The irony of the title is that there is no such thing as a small bomb.  However, some bombings garner more international attention than others.  In this novel, the bombing of a market in Delhi barely registers as a tragic event, except to those who lost loved ones in the blast.  Two boys, ages 11 and 13, die, but their friend Mansoor survives, fleeing the market and abandoning his dead buddies.  We follow Mansour into adulthood, who is stricken by survivor’s guilt, as well as carpal tunnel syndrome, which ends his Computer Science studies in the U.S.  For me, however, the character development in this book is lacking.  I never got a good sense of who Mansoor is at his core, as he seems to morph from scholar to activist to religious fanatic, depending on who his friends are.  Nor did I feel particularly moved by the pain and grief that the Khuranas, parents of the dead boys, suffer.  They have another child, a daughter, but the father does not love the child, and the mother ignores her, becoming heavily involved in the comforting of the families of other bomb victims.  I would say that the author does a good job of depicting the types of loosely organized groups that carry out these horrific politically motivated bombings without remorse.  I certainly did not find myself sympathizing with any of them.

FRESHWATER by Akwaeke Emezi

This book is truly weird, and I do not mean that in a good way.  The book is about a young woman named Ada who moves from Nigeria to the U.S. at 16 to go to college.  She is mostly cut off from family and friends, and her body is inhabited by “gods,” including one in particular that leads her body into a number of sexual encounters.  The gods also serve as narrators, and I was never sure if Ada had a multiple personality disorder or whether she was possessed.  Either way, the book left me wondering if Ada had a soul apart from the demons.  She certainly has no trouble finding lovers, but otherwise, this novel does not have much of a plot, and Ada’s character, as I said, is difficult to distinguish from those of the gods residing in her mind.  I wish I had something good to say about this book, other than the fact that the writing is good if you can overlook the grammatical errors.  Near the end we find that some events in Ada’s childhood may have contributed to her mental distress, but I felt that the author added this information more as an excuse and an afterthought than as a substantive contributor to Ada’s issues.  If, in fact, the voices in Ada’s head are actually related to mental illness, I don’t think the cause is necessarily that cut and dried, nor is the resolution ever achieved.  Basically, I did not understand this book, and therefore I was unable to glean any kind of meaning, education, admiration, or pleasure from it.