If I Had Your Face

I had some difficulties with this book. First of all, I had a hard time getting into the story and liking the characters. It was just a bit too much of everything and became unnecessarily superficial. The story is about four different women and their fates. None of them were likeable to me, even though you definitely feel sympathy while reading. The story is kind of boring from the first page, although it is actually short. The book is sad and leaves you with a strange feeling. Mainly because,..SPOILERthe ending is completely open and meaningless. You don't know more at the end than you did at the beginning....

great book. it offers a very interesting and in-depth insight into society and beauty standards in Korea. smooth writing style.highly recommended

Just when the character's stories really became interesting, they dropped off and the book suddenly ended. It was a disappointment.

Frances Cha’s debut novel features Korean friends, Ara, Kyuri, Wonna, and Miho, as they struggle for another night of action in the competitive pursuit of men to support them. Multiple facial surgeries, suicides, abortions, showdowns with wives and madams, girl-gang fights, escaping orphanages; it’s all in a day’s work for these unlikely heroines. What you will not find in these pages is a neat little ending, tied up with a bow. In Cha’s world a life isn’t about its ending, but about its being lived, and these young women live life to the hilt. A graduate of Columbia’s Writing Program, Ms. Cha is a perceptive writer, which is a big help to a reader unfamiliar with this culture:• I had no idea what she was talking about, but I smiled so as not to dispel such heightened notions of me.• It’s basic human nature, this need to look down on someone to feel better about yourself. There is no point in getting upset about it.• I give the mom a hard once-over. She looks haggard, even under a full load of makeup.• I wish I could invite one or more of them over, but that would require me to possess an entirely different personality.• I hate Boston Asian food.• I was not supposed to be amazed by the unusual beauty of the apartment, but thick-crust pizza called for riots.• It’s amazing how much people talk about television.• I have always thought of hope as a natural folly of youth that should be discarded as soon as possible.• That kind of dosage is for people who have just given birth, he warned. What about people who will never be able to give birth? I wanted to ask.• She believes girls should operate like Venus fly traps, opening only for prey that can actually be caught.• When he finally ventured outside, people looked at him with a mixture of horror and blame and pity and thirst, and he had never known such combinations of expressions were possible on a human face.• I sit down on a stool and face him, trying to mimic the expression Kyuri has taught me for lulling a man into thinking he has your full attention.• And, actually, can you send someone to pick up an Italian sandwich from that sandwich place on the corner, the famous one? I forget the name.Ms. Cha’s book is the fourth novel workshopped at the Columbia Fiction Foundry to be commercially published, but the first to have acknowledged it. Thoughtful of a woman for whom the journey is everything.

The opening chapters of Cha's novel are highly engaging, as she delves into issues not only being applied to South Korean culture but also to any patriarchal system--women who live on the edge of disaster, who have jobs that literally cater to men by pouring their drinks and flirting with them, sometimes delving into sex work, requiring them to upkeep themselves with painful and expensive surgeries to keep what little advantage they have. Cha chooses a split narrative, shifting among these women and others teetering on a precipice due to the power the men in their lives, as well as the higher class people they service, with an economy that will bury them if they fail. As the novel continues, however, these shifts in narrative feel more like an accounting of social issues and the effects of classism and patriarchy than delving further into character, leaving the latter half of the book without much drive for me. Even though some dramatic events occur, I felt they were more to play out the commentary than engage me with the characters themselves.