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Review: Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin

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Short book review first:

Fallen In Love, book 3.5 of Fallen series, by Lauren Kate
I found out the book is so silly and meaningless that it doesn't deserves anything good remark from me.

Why am I still reading book from the Fallen series? Maybe I'm waiting for miracle to happen, maybe I'm still waiting for Lauren Kate to somehow redeem her creation. But no, she didn't do it with her four books of the Fallen series, she wasn't doing it in Fallen in Love neither.

Those short stories in Fallen In Love read like some teenage cheap romances, and those stories add nothing to the mythologies of angels, they don't help us to understand the characters better. WHAT A DISAPPOINTMENT.

Now here's the main review:

Book Review: Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin

Book Description from Goodreads.com: A million-plus-copy best seller in Korea—a magnificent English-language debut poised to become an international sensation—this is the stunning, deeply moving story of a family’s search for their mother, who goes missing one afternoon amid the crowds of the Seoul Station subway.

Told through the piercing voices and urgent perspectives of a daughter, son, husband, and mother, Please Look After Mom is at once an authentic picture of contemporary life in Korea and a universal story of family love.

You will never think of your mother the same way again after you read this book.


I really, really don't like this book.

Although I don't mean to say it's a badly written book, it isn't. But I dislike how the author sets up this Mother character as some sort of 'ideal mother'---she is tireless, selfless, all-giving, she puts her family above her own self, she never complained even when FOR YEARS no one appreciated her sacrifice, her whole life is nothing but taking care of her husband and her family.

Over and over and over I was told how GREAT this mother is, how everyone came to realize how important she is after she disappointed from the train station.

The more I read the book, the more I feel like this book serves as a 'guilt trap', the author created the most flawless, selfless mother and pushed her before us, so that we are obligated to feel sorry for her.

I hate being guilt-trapped into feeling sorry for anyone, I hate it a great deal.

But what disappointed me the most is, the author never challenged the belief that an 'ideal' mother should be selfless, giving, tireless and thinks nothing but caring for her husband and children. She never questions this kind of 'Mother=Madonna=Long-Suffering-Martyr' stereotype. In the book, the mother is being described as having no desire of her own, she has nothing outside of her family. She is just someone else's wife, someone else's mother, NOTHING MORE; and this problematic fact is not challenged or even being put into question. That pisses me off so badly.
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Shyanne-Kai's avatar
Such a shame. It seems like the mother deserves some development into her own interests and life beyond her family after all her self-sacrifice for them. People aren't this perfect, and it is their flaws which makes them interesting. When will authors realise this?!