“I needed to see him. I needed to know how he was getting on so that I could figure out who I was supposed to become; how I was supposed to live.”

Has anyone else watched an episode of Law & Order and thought: “Are any of the victims’ family members going to therapy? Is there a grief counselor visiting the classmates?” This novella starts out with the familiar structure of a detective procedural but develops less into a whodunnit and more into a story about how grief can ripple through a person’s immediate circle and manifest in strange ways for years afterwards. The reflections of various characters come with so little closure; a sense that life goes on because it must until it doesn’t.

This is Korean book translated into English. There were a few, very few, passages that kept some Korean in and had footnotes. It’s also a very short book. It’s set as 8 (I think) chapters, each a snippet in time, told from the viewpoint of one of the 3 females, told over a period of about 10 years, maybe more.

It starts out as a high school murder mystery. A girl, Hae-On, is found dead. There are 2 suspects from school, a rich boy and a poor boy. The rich boy has an airtight alibi but the poor boy doesn’t. Neither ends up arrested for the murder and I guess it eventually goes cold.

The 3 female viewpoints we hear are a student who was fairly new at school at the time of the murder, Da-On the younger sister of the murdered girl, and Taerim a girl who was a witness to the last known whereabouts of the murdered girl as well she later married the rich boy suspect.

Each chapter took me a minute or longer to realize whose viewpoint we were now getting. Da-On seemed obsessed with solving the murder and goes to some crazy lengths to try to keep Hae-On’s memory alive. Taerim’s viewpoint were always in the form of speaking to a therapist. The new girl seemed to be more of getting the info we needed to know into the story.

In the end we are never told what actually happened. I think there are enough clues to draw a conclusion as well there are clues to other crimes committed that aren’t answered for as well.

This book won’t be for everyone but I enjoyed it.

This is one of those quieter mysteries (I mean, a murder mystery nonetheless) that is less of a thriller and more an examination of human dynamics. I really enjoyed the analysis of femininity, beauty, anger, family, death, etc. However, Lemon did feel a bit incomplete. Not enough questions were answered, especially for a book set up to be a mystery. But I still thought the writing and characters were worth the read.

✧ ✧ ✧

≪reading 31 books for 31 days of july≫
╰┈➤ 1. intimacies by katie kitamura
╰┈➤ 2. convenience store woman by sayaka murata
╰┈➤ 3. shout by laurie halse anderson
╰┈➤ 4. lemon by kwon yeo-sun