I feel like I should like this more than I should. It was good. It wasn't great. It wasn't horrible. I grew tired of some of the flash back stories and Korean folklore stories. I wont deny I had hoped to have things a little more tied up at the end but that's not always reality and I think she was shooting for that. Some of the story lines feel a little choppy looking back on it but didn't read that way at the time. I think that is what I mean when I said I hoped things were tied up a little better at the end. There were lines of story that I thought either would be explored further or didn't make sense as to why they were really there. All said, I'd try her next book when it comes out. ( )

I found this book extremely well-written, but I never really connected with it except on a very superficial level. Janie, the narrator, was very sympathetic but not very empathetic. She was very... flat. Her emotions and motivations never shone through the story. Hannah, her sister, was this great mysterious void, but once she showed up in the plot again shrank into the background.

Throughout the book, I wanted more. More emotion, more background, more explanation, more exposition. For a first person narrative, I didn't find out too much about Janie as a person, especially since this is a coming of age story of sorts, despite Janie already being an adult. She had allowed herself to be subsumed by her parents' expectations for her, and in the story she slowly begins to exert her own own authority over her life. At the same time, Hannah had the opposite journey where she had completely renounced her parents and then started coming back to them.

This was a theme that I wish had been explored more, rather than the soap opera reasons for the two sisters to pull away from each other and from their parents (physically for one, and emotionally for the other). Instead, the story focused on Janie's relationship with her father in a meandering and not always satisfying fashion.

Review copy courtesy of the publisher via LibraryThing's Early Reviewer Program ( )

After almost 8 years living in Korea and 26 years of marriage to a Korean (now Korean-American) spouse, I can still find myself surprised when I find some tidbit of Korean culture I did not know or did not fully understand. I found several instances of this while reading Forgotten Country, where I had to stop for an "aha" moment when I thought back to some past incident, family moment or activity that, I realize now, I didn't fully understand at the time.

I have to wonder, however, whether a non-Korean or, more broadly, a non-Asian audience will appreciate all the subtleties of the cultural dynamics going on between the characters described in this book. How many readers will get the references to Korean mythology or the dynamics of multi-generational relationships, fathers and daughters, mothers and daughters, brothers and sisters and, of course, sisters and sisters which is what a lot of this book is about.

Which is not to say that it is not well written and enjoyable...it is. In fact, I put it on my favorites shelf because it echoes so much of my own experience with my extended Korean family or, more accurately, my wife's experience of family, and family history. The book draws on Korean history...the Japanese colonial period, the student uprising and massacre in Kwangju and the politics of a Korea that was still wavering between dictatorship and democracy.

My wife's father's family was once part of the local government in Cholla province and lost their positions to Japanese administrators. Later, during the Korean war, in order to avoid being drafted into the ROK military (this was as much of a death sentence at the time as fighting in the war), my mother-in-law helped her husband hide in mountain caves and secretly brought food to him and others. So much of what has happened since then to my wife's family was dependent on what happened during these historical events which is what this book also conveys.

So much has changed since we left Korea in 1997 and every time we go back we have to navigate a culture and family traditions that we no longer participate in or, have changed so much that even my wife feels out of place. This is much like Janie and Hannah in the book, and I found myself empathizing with Hannah especially, because I see my wife's growing distance and, at times, anger with the way she is treated as the youngest member of what would be considered a very large family here in the US. Hannah is straightforward and says exactly how she feels, even at the risk of offending family members, my wife holds her tongue and keeps the anger and frustration inside.

I am already reading Catherine Chung's second novel, The Tenth Muse, and, I am already thinking it will be as good as Forgotten Country.

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I put down this book. I think I have read too many good books lately and this one wasn't cutting it. It reminded me of a good book I read for asian-am lit "american knees.". This one was dragging and I found I wasn't caring enough to continue. I am growing! ( )

A beautifully written Korean American family saga that covers a number of major issues of Korean American immigrant families - the conflicts between traditional Korean vs American family expectations, the isolation and discrimination, the ghosts of the past in Korea, as well as the universal theme of loss. There is an unflinching honesty to the writing and a poetic sensibility that I admired. A remarkable debut. ( )