If I Had Your Face in Around the World in 80 Books

Mar 02, 2024 Nadine in NY Jones rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, 100-best-of-21st-c, literary-schmiterary, audio, korean

This book performs that very difficult task of depicting difficult lives with joy. All five of the women in this book are struggling in different ways, but I never felt hopeless or depressed while reading. These young women just keep putting one foot in front of another. They might lose hope for a night, or a week, but not forever; they get right back at it again. Almost all the men in this story are horrible people (but not all of them).

This is told from four POVs, about five Korean women w This book performs that very difficult task of depicting difficult lives with joy. All five of the women in this book are struggling in different ways, but I never felt hopeless or depressed while reading. These young women just keep putting one foot in front of another. They might lose hope for a night, or a week, but not forever; they get right back at it again. Almost all the men in this story are horrible people (but not all of them).

This is told from four POVs, about five Korean women whose lives intersect: Ara, Kyuri (my favorite, and the woman I saw as the main protagonist), Wonna, Miho, and Sujin. Each of these women has lived through some version of hell and come out changed for it. They have each hit a bottom of one sort or another, and remain placid in the face of near hopelessness, and in some cases they make what might seem like radical choices. As Kyuri says, "It is easy to leap if you have no choice."

The title comes early in the novel, as Kyuri is comparing her post-surgery face with a K-Pop star seeing the same surgeon.

Up close, I saw that her eyes were streaked with red, as if she had been crying, and she had ugly spots on her chin. She hasn’t been having a good year, with all those rumors flying about how she has been bullying Xuna, the new girl in their group, and that she’s busy running around with a new boyfriend and missing rehearsals. The comments on Internet portal sites have been merciless and torrential.

… I wanted to reach over and shake her by the shoulders. Stop running around like a fool, I wanted to say. You have so much and you can do anything you want. I would live your life so much better than you, if I had your face.

The cover art of my edition is absolutely gorgeous, it shows a beautiful young Korean woman with a somewhat dreamy expression, seemingly floating in a sea of star-shaped jasmine flowers. I was DELIGHTED when Miho starts drawing a similar scene:

Finally, I start working again in my room—beginning a sketch on a small letter-size sheet of paper. A sea of thrashing eels, above it, floating, a four-poster bed, from which I am looking down. This time it is not Ruby, it is me, and I am naked. I erase lightly and coax one of the eels to become a slender tree. I start adding tiny starlike flowers onto the branches.

I shouldn’t be going into such detail with pencil—this is a stupid little sketch—but I can’t help myself. I used to do this a lot—sketch out the entire idea first before re-creating it as a larger painting or a sculpture—but I don’t usually do it anymore. It vexes me, but relieves me too, working in minutiae, in pencil, thinking about oils. The flowers should be a dusty pink—or would coral work better? Should there be a butterfly or two? Should they turn back into eels and come into the bed?

The reader's discussion notes at the end point out that Sujin is never given her own POV, and asks "why do you think the author chose not to give Sujin her own voice in the story?" and that's an excellent question that I have no answer for!! This would make a great book club book, there are so many things I'd love to discuss, and several questions raised in the "reader's guide" that I have no answers for.

My clueless American brain could not keep the names straight, so I ended up taking notes (see below if you're interested). The audiobook used four different readers, and each reader did a good job of depicting a particular personality for each woman, which helped, but I still got confused.

I also learned that I am horrible at pronouncing Korean names and place names. Seoul, for example, is not "soul" - it's more like "soo-uh(l)" two syllables run closely together with the L only suggested, not strongly pronounced. Kyuri sounds a lot like "cutie" - if you say "cutie" but think of an R sound when you say the T sound so that your tongue sort of skips between the two, it comes close.

This is the sort of thing that really should go in the Private Notes section, but that section won't accept this much text, so here we go. These aren't really spoilers, but it also isn't really part of my review.
(view spoiler) ...more

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Dec 03, 2021 Pam rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: audio-book, fiction, 2021-books-read, korea, new-york

AUTHOR . Cha, Frances
TITLE If I Had Your Face
DATE READ 11/29/21
RATING 4/B
FIRST SENTENCE
GENRE/PUB DATE/FORMAT/LENGTH Fiction/2020/Audible/8 hr 10 min
SERIES/STAND ALONE SA
CHALLENGE Good Reads 2021 106/120
GROUP READ Tailored Book Recommendations
TIME/PLACE Korea/Present
CHARACTERS Kyuri, Miho, Ara and Wonna – 4 young South Korean women
COMMENTS Suggested by Tailored book Recommendations – had never heard of the author or book so was happy to dig in. Told from the viewpoints of 4 young women – struggl ...more

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