Folklorn
Ratings5
Average rating4.1
“Ghost story, family saga, parable, feminist reimagined myth: Angela Mi Young Hur’s hugely ambitious Folklorn is a spellbinding shape-shifter of a novel that tackles questions of race, culture, and history head-on, exploring the blurry boundaries between past and present, fact and fantasy, and personal and cultural—or cosmic.” —Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires Everywhere A New York Times Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy Novel of 2021 | An NPR Best Book of 2021 A genre-defying, continents-spanning saga of Korean myth, scientific discovery, and the abiding love that binds even the most broken of families. Elsa Park is a particle physicist at the top of her game, stationed at a neutrino observatory in the Antarctic, confident she’s put enough distance between her ambitions and the family ghosts she’s run from all her life. But it isn’t long before her childhood imaginary friend—an achingly familiar, spectral woman in the snow—comes to claim her at last. Years ago, Elsa’s now-catatonic mother warned her that women of their line were doomed to repeat the narrative lives of their ancestors from Korean myth and legend. But Elsa also faces a more earthly fate: the mental illness and generational trauma that run in her immigrant family. When her mother breaks her decade-long silence and tragedy strikes, Elsa must return to her childhood home in California. There, among family wrestling with their own demons, she unravels the secrets hidden in the handwritten pages of her mother’s dark stories: of women’s desire and fury; of magic suppressed, stolen, or punished; of the hunger for vengeance. Folklorn is a wondrous and necessary exploration of the myths we inherit and those we fashion for ourselves.
Reviews
Popular Reviews
Reviews with the most likes.
3.5 rounded up.
I really enjoyed this book from the start to about the 85% mark at which point things seemed to just start dragging on and on, oddly enough considering the character's mental state.
A little slow and meandering, but ultimately absolutely beautiful. This is definitely more character-driven than plot-driven. I love the magical realism, the way everything comes together, and the family relationships and intergenerational explorations. This was lovely.
So Elsa is a Korean-American physicist who's escaped to the South Pole, which frankly is about as far away as you can get from your immigrant family on the planet. But there, in the waning last days of the Antarctic's endless daytime, she is visited by her childhood imaginary friend.
There's a lot going on here. The stories overlay each other and reveal something larger when combined. Elsa is researching neutrinos, elemental particles born from cataclysmic violence. Elusive and never seen they're called “ghost particles” From particle physics to ancient folklore and the Emmileh Bell which only finds its voice when a monk casts a child into the molten metal, its ring a child's call to her mother. All of it echoes the tragic history that burdens Elsa's own mother.
That puzzle box of a novel would be achievement enough but entangled within are the stories of Elsa's brother, more than a little messed up and rebelling against the cliched immigrant parent expectations. And Elsa's boyfriend, the wonderfully named Oskar Gantelius, the ethnically Korean adoptee of Swedish parents helping her unlock the secrets buried in her mother's folklore stories while figuring out who he is exactly. And don't forget that ghostly unseen friend that may or may not be her own lost sister from when her mother disappeared to Korea.
Technical difficulty is off the charts and the book rewards some close, considered reading.
