The Picture Bride follows the story of three "Picture Brides": Willow, Hong-ju and Songhwa, showing the treatment they received as brides without revealing too much, how some are as young as seventeen, become isolated, and are illiterate. It's definitely a difficult read emotionally, particularly for me as I tend to become too invested in the characters I read about.

The book was definitely hard to get into for me as it provided an introduction to the world of Picture Brides, a practice I was aware of but did not really know too much about. At its core the practice of selecting brides and grooms to matchmake using only their photos, and was predominant in Hawaii and Korea (My understanding of the practice has been helped by Wikipedia). However, it was easy to read the text - just to make that clear.

I say this with any translated book I read but I'm saying it again, the core essence of any book is lost, I won't feel the same emotions reading this in English as I would if I knew Korean and could read The Picture Bride how it was meant to be read. Translation is hard, it's hard capturing just what made The Picture Bride special and bringing it to a new language, An Seon Jae does a wonderful job translating.

Overall, The Picture Bride is a solid read for lovers of historical fiction; a 3-star read.

Thanks to Lee Geum-yi, An Seon Jae, Net Galley, and Scribe UK for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Book #242 of 2022.

아프게, 기쁘게, 뜨겁게
인생의 파도를 넘어서며 살아갈 것이다.

"“Those guys are just like us. Our life is also a kind of surfing,” said Hongju

Willow immediately understood what Hongju meant. As Hongju said, for her, too, life’s crises had come raging, innumerable like the waves of the sea. The deaths of her father and brother, the life that had followed, life in Hawaiʻi as a picture bride . . . Nothing was ever easy. The same was true for Hongju and Songhwa.

Willow put her arm round Hongju’s shoulder and watched Songhwa as she followed the children. They, having left Korea together, would go on living together, rising above the waves, painfully, joyfully, passionately."

The Picture Bride (2022) is An Seonjae's translation of 하로라, 나의 엄마들 (“Alola, My Mothers”, 2020) by 이군이 (Lee Geum-yi).

The novel centres around three 'picture brides' who travel from Korea, under Japanese occupation, to Hawaiʻi in 1918, part of a wave of such women in the period 1910-1924, Willow (버들, although the translator explains in her afterword that she chose to translate this name rather than render it phonetically), Hong-ju (홍주) and Songhwa (송화).

A latter section of the novel is set in December 1941, just after Pearl Harbour and has one of the women's daughters, 진주 / Pearl, with a close connection to all three women (hence the Korean title), looking back on what happened to them, as well as finding out a surprise about her own origins.

Much of the novel is rather standard historical fiction which at times I found a little melodramatic and others rather dull.

But the most interesting parts of the novel, although in the background, are the factional struggles in the overseas Korean independence movement between Park Yong-man (박용만) and Syngman Rhee (이승만), the latter the first President of South Korea from 1948 and the former assassinated in Beijing on 17 October 1928 by a Korean communist.

And the novel also showcases the entreprenurial spirit of the Korean wome (noted in the Wikipedia article above), who support each other's business ventures with a self-help savings club, a 계 (gye).

In parts this was a 2 star read, but awarding 3 for the interesting elements of Korean emigrant and resistance history.

Vivid, expansive and richly imagined….. An absolutely heartbreaking and unforgettable read, perfect for fans of gripping family dramas, and for those who enjoy great storytelling.

This book threw me a little bit. I would have solidly given it 4 stars before Part Three Pearl's Story. After finishing that final part, it really dropped the book for me.

Parts 2/3 follow Willow as she leaves her small village to travel to Hawaiʻi to marry Taewan with two other women from her village. This is, for Willow and Songhwa, their first time leaving their village, but for Hongju, a second chance at life after being widowed. Willow's story is well written, simple language and easy to follow and empathise with. Her picture husband is exactly how he looks, something the other Picture Bride's with her cannot say. She is blessed with a father-in-law who adores her and fills a gap in her heart from losing her own father. We follow her story, and that of Hongju and Songhwa's, as they navigate new married life, pregnancy, giving birth and setting down roots in a home away from home, among other Koreans in Hawaiʻi. It's overall a really lovely story of finding the best in a new place and sisterhood as Hongju, Songhwa and Willow support each other through their lows. Had the book ended there - 4 stars. No question. The beach scene and conversation was a beautiful moment and would have tied things together well.

Moving into Part Three, Pearl's Story, it picks up 18 years later. Hongju is now called Rose, though this is explained why. For those of us who remember Willow and Taewan's conversation about their first baby, 'His English name will be Donald', their son is now David. That took me a second to clarify but I digress. Pearl's POV shifts to first person, a change from the previous third person POV. Peal is a wholly unlikable character from our brief glimpse. Her POV is meant to be the difficulty in being an American while also being the child of a Korean immigrant. She's consequently written in a very demanding and entitled manner. It's not to say she's poorly written, just really unlikable as a result.
Her 'revelation' about her identity and who she is felt unneeded. It also results in a curve ball about Willow's second baby that I'm not totally clear what it brought to the story.
For me, this Part Three let down the rest of the book.

It is a solidly enjoyable book. I am glad I read it and the author's note and translator's note at the end provided extra context for the story and choices made in translation. Both were a nice bonus to read more about. If you like historical fiction with a grounding in real stories, this a great, easy read of choice. Just maaaaybe less so in the final third of the book.

(Side note for the publisher: There is a point in the book where Taewan becomes 'Taiwan'.)

This is a quite slow book, it took me longer than I thought to read it. I didn't know anything about picture brides until this point and it was interesting to learn about that in that period of time.

The book is divided into three parts. The last one felt to me quite rushed. I would have preferred if the story continued to focus on Willow rather than from the point of view of her daughter, who seems to be a spoiled brat!

The writing style is not what I expect from a historical fiction book. It was too casual sometimes. There are many Korean words in the text, which is great! but some kind of glossary or translation in cursive next to the words would be helpful for people who don't know the language and culture.

The author's and translator's afterwords helped me understand more about where the story came from and other things like why some characters had Christian names but others didn't.

I will definitely read more from this author,

This is the second book in recent months that I have read about the 'Picture Brides'. Once again I enjoyed the subject matter and learnt lots from it. I found this copy hard to read at times during the formatting sometimes only having 2 words on a line!
I felt the final part of the book, 'Pearl's Story' was somewhat rushed and I was left having many questions at the end of the book. Personally I would have preferred the story to have continued in Willow's eyes and more detail having been given to some aspects such as Songwha's story.
Overall I would recommend to others and would look for more by the author.

A fascinating read historical fiction at its best.A story of Korean women known as picture brides picked by Korean men who had emigrated to Hawaii and sent for these women to be their brides.I was immediately drawn in to the lives of these women as they adjust to their new lives .This is emotionally moving a story that kept me involved from beginning to end.#netgalley #scribeuk

I love reading about and learning about new cultures but the Korean culture is not one that I know much about and so I was so excited to get to read this book. It was well written with a compelling storyline and well developed characters. This was an easy and enjoyable read and I will be looking for more books from this author

This was an interesting historical novel, told from one woman’s perspective, about the struggles of the Korean picture brides coming to America. The stories weren’t glamorised, and seemed authentic, yet I found the overall story quite slow going and aimless. The story felt as though you were reading a persons life story, rather than a work of fiction due to the writing style, and thus it wasn’t very captivating. I did enjoy the early parts, but found i got tired of it at around 1/2 - 2/3 in and so left it

A straightforward, page-turner charting the history of early Korean communities in Hawaii, through the personal experiences of women known as the picture brides. These were women who left their families in Korea to start afresh as wives of Korean men working on Hawaii’s sugar plantations. Through matchmakers they exchanged photographs with prospective husbands, in a variation on a traditional, arranged marriage. Many were sold a blatant lie, spun tales of a glorious place and shown misleading or downright fraudulent photographs that completely misrepresented their future husbands. The women were mostly very young but the men often turned out to be much, much older and far from prosperous. Some even had existing wives left behind in Korea. It was a scheme mainly intended to benefit plantation owners who believed that married men made for better, more reliable workers.

Lee Geum-Yi’s novel opens in 1917 with Willow who’s almost 18, and living with her impoverished family in rural Korea. The brutal Japanese occupation of Korea is well established and her prospects as a Korean woman are limited. Then she’s offered a chance to help her family and finally fulfil her own dreams, she exchanges photographs with a man looking for a partner and not long after travels out to Hawaii with a group of similar brides. But Hawaii isn’t the island paradise they’d pictured, and their husbands don’t live up to their descriptions. Lee’s narrative follows the resourceful Willow and close friends Hongju and Songhwa over the course of several years, as they struggle to carve out a space for themselves far from home.

Lee’s a popular author in Korea, known for her YA fiction, this is her first book for adults. It’s solidly told - although there are some awkward, breathless sections and the prose can be a little unvarnished at times. I also found the sudden shift in perspective and timelines in the final sections more than a little disorientating, too obviously a device for speedy coverage of a broad span of Hawaiian history up to the bombing of Pearl Harbour and its aftermath. But it’s a meticulously-researched piece, at its strongest, an absorbing, moving recreation of the everyday lives of picture brides, as well as the culture of Korean communities in Hawaii. I relished the details of how Koreans adjusted to a society so vastly different from the one they left behind; and was fascinated by Lee’s depiction of growing divisions in Korean communities over the fight for Korean Independence, the factions that formed and the sometimes-violent clashes that followed. And I think it’s a book that’s bound to appeal to Pachinko fans wondering what to pick up next. Lee’s work’s been adapted for the screen more than once, and I’d love to see a K-drama version of this one - it even features the requisite birth secret.

It’s a fairly undemanding read but there are some terms here, particularly around naming, that might be puzzling for anyone completely unfamiliar with Korean culture. However, these are explained in the translator’s afterword, and there’s also a useful overview from Lee herself. Translated by An Seonjae.

Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Scribe UK for an ARC