This whole summer I had a question swirling around my head: what’s a good book to read?
I no longer tolerate vampires, werewolves, fairies or any immortals. Truly, it was hard finding a genuinely good book that hasn’t been retold a thousand times. But I eventually found a rare gem in today’s supernatural-obsessed literature world.
Written by Samuel Park, This Burns My Heart is set in post-war Daegu inSouth Korea. Soo-Ja Choi, the main character (based on the author’s mother), gets proposed to by the man she thinks will be able to set her free and let her become a diplomat. The day before her wedding, the man she truly loves proposes, but she turns him down. Marrying into a big family, Soo-Ja has to be the “mom” of her husband’s four younger siblings.
Her plan was to marry a man who would allow her to do what her parents had never allowed her to do (they were rather her travel with a husband than on her own). Instead, she deals with in-laws that only think of themselves and take advantage of her father’s wealth.
Soo-Ja’s dream of becoming a diplomat and visiting other countries shatters when Min Lee, her husband, shackles her down to a miserable life with his family. As a teenager, Soo-Ja had been known to be strong and always got what she wanted but when she marries Min, her strength diminished and she is left only as a shadow of her true self. Her true love, Yul-Bok Kim, keeps popping up periodically when she needs him the most. Although Soo-Ja bears her current life, she can’t help wonder what her life would have been like if she had just accepted Yul’s proposal when he had asked her the day before her wedding with Min.
Soo-Ja’s brief encounter with Yul when they were young was enough to tell her that she had done a terrible spur-of-the-moment decision in marrying Min. Her careless teenage self thought that everything was easy and would work out perfectly like a fairy tale but she was wrong.
Park’s portrayal of emotions is represented wonderfully through the whole book. When Soo-Ja felt hopeless I wanted to console her; when her in-laws embarrassed her I reacted the same way as Soo-Ja did. With words like abeoji (father) and eonni (older sister), Park gives a glimpse into South Korean traditions and customs since a big part of their culture is to respect the elderly.
Honestly, This Burns My Heart is truly a unique find and a great debut novel for Park. Starting off strong from the very beginning, Park kept me traveling alongside Soo-Ja until the very end and seeing her off into her new life.
