Honey in the Wound

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Honey in the Wound is the debut novel of Jiyoung Han. The story is about a Korean family confronting the brutality of the Japanese empire. The Japanese occupied Korea and parts of China during this era. It's an epic tale of five generations of one family. It was published on April 7, 2026.

The publisher's summary:

A sister disappears and returns as a tiger. A mother’s voice compels the truth from any tongue. A granddaughter divines secrets in others’ dreams. These women are all of one lineage—a Korean family split across decades and borders by Japanese imperialism.

At this saga’s heart is Young-Ja, a girl who infuses food with her emotions. She revels in her gift for cooking, nourishing the people she loves with her cheerfulness. But her sunny childhood comes to an end in 1931 when Japanese soldiers crush her family’s defiance against the Empire. Young-Ja is cast adrift, her food turning increasingly bitter with grief. When a Korean rebel fighter notices her talents, however, she is whisked off to Manchuria to join a secretive sisterhood of beautiful teahouse spies. There, Young-Ja finds a new sense of belonging and starts using her abilities for the resistance. But the Imperial Army is not yet finished with her…

Decades later, Young-Ja lives alone in Seoul, withdrawn from the world until her Tokyo-born granddaughter Rinako bursts into her life with the ability to see into dreams. In cultivating a tentative bond, they confront the long-buried past in a stunning emotional climax.

As an unforgettable family perseveres in the long shadow of colonialism, Honey in the Wound transports readers to mountain forests where tiger-girls stalk, to Manchurian teahouses and opium dens where charming smiles veil secrets, and to the modern metropolises of Tokyo and Seoul where restless ghosts stir. This debut novel is a tender yet powerful multi-generational drama that shines light onto the twentieth century’s darkest corners and gives voice to those who bore witness.

I found writing my review of this book was difficult. So much happened that I didn't know where to start. It's an emotional story for sure and I felt that my emotions were overwhelmed. Heart-wrenching is the best word to describe the book. The story centers on Young-Ja, whose ability to cook her emotions into food was her superpower as a youth. This is where the magical realism joins the plot. When her family was executed by Japanese soldiers, Young-Ja ran and hid. She was lucky to survive but her overwhelming grief made her susceptible to corrupt men. Right after Young-Ja's family passed away, she was found unconscious near a lake. A barren couple took her in and treated her as their own. Young-Ja stayed with them for several years but when the husband began sexually assaulting her during the night, the wife gave her to a man who offered Young-Ja a fantastic job in China. 

The job was not fantastic. Young-Ja was forced to work long hours in a tea house kitchen in the northern area of Korea.  However, she thrived there and was promoted to hostess in the tea rooms. She and her fellow hostesses and servers listened to conversations that Japanese soldiers had among themselves. This information was given to people in the resistance movement. After nine years, the Japanese arrested the tea house owner and burned it to the ground. Unfortunately, Young-Ja ended being kidnapped and taken to Manchuria to be a comfort woman for Japanese soldiers. Her life gets even worse.

This is a sad story but realistic for the time and place. The author did a fine job writing about this unknown event in history. She showed how horribly the Koreans were treated by the Japaneses soldiers. Young-Ja's life affected me deeply. I mourned with her every time something bad happened to her. 

All of the characters were well developed. Young-Ja's grandparents had an interesting backstory. I loved reading about them. Her grandmother Myoung-Ok toiled as a farmer. When Myoung-OK eventually married Dahn, who was considered a giant by the villagers, she left her agrarian existence and moved to the mountains with him. There they gave birth to twins. Geum-Jin married Song Jung-Soon even though she had a facial disfigurement. They raised several children including Young-Ja. Their story was also intriguing and one of the best parts of the book. 

While Honey in the Wound is a good book, I don't know if I should recommend it. It made me sad for about a week after I finished reading. Who wants to deal with that! My rating of 5 out of 5 stars reflects the fantastic research that went into the story as well as the writing of this saga.

Too Much and Never Enough

Donald Trump's niece Mary Trump wrote this fabulous revenge book that was just published this morning. Mary Trump is a licensed psychologist who covered the life of the family from its beginnings with Fred Trump marrying his Scottish wife Mary Anne MacLeod.  It ends in 2020 at the end of Donald Trump's first term in the White House.  Within the book's pages, niece Mary Trump portrays her famous uncle as never having emotionally attached to his parents, his mother in particular, due to parental neglect that began when he was two years old.  She writes that the behavior of infants and toddlers is a form of attachment behavior, which seeks a positive, comforting response from caregivers. Uncle Donald and his younger brother Robert did not obtain any positive responses from their parents.  The author calls this child abuse.  By the time he was four, Donald Trump had learned all of the behaviors that he continues to exhibit today.

Uncle Donald was the fourth of five children.  When he was two years old his mother was found on the floor of a bathroom bleeding.  She had an emergency hysterectomy and two additional surgeries for medical problems that stemmed from the hysterectomy.  In essence, she was not available to raise her children until Uncle Donald was four.  During those two years of his life, he learned from his father that it was better to not be needy and began acting as if nothing ever bothered him.  Fred was proud of his brashness because it showed that he was tough.  He learned to bully, lie, cheat and steal from his siblings as way to becoming successful.  In the Trump family success was defined as not being humiliated by Fred.  Mother Mary Anne was never able to develop an attachment with her second son Donald after she recovered from her surgeries.  The author does not speculate why other than Mary Anne was constantly breaking bones due to osteoporosis that set in after the hysterectomy. 

The author is the daughter of Fred Trump, Jr., the oldest son and expected heir to the Trump Companies.  Throughout the book she upholds her father as the only member of the family to ever support themselves financially.  Fred Jr. did not want to work for his father and pursued being a commercial pilot until the family coerced him to quit his job at TWA and return to working for Trump Companies.  None of his siblings ever supported themselves, preferring to take Fred's money instead.  Yet Fred Jr. was ridiculed by his siblings, especially Donald, as being a failure because he worked as a pilot.  He also served in the Air Force National Guard which the family thought was a waste of time. Fred Jr. died when the author was 16.

I have to be a spoiler her and say that Mary Trump wanted revenge against the family for what they did to her father and she gets her revenge.  On the last page of the book she accuses Uncle Donald of being a mass murderer as his inaction caused many deaths from COVID-19. She also writes that he knows that no one loves him and never will...and he killed her father.  

The book is a fast read and is a fascinating look at the psychology behind the dysfunctional first family. It is a must read. 

The Mountains Sing

The Mountain Sings by Nguyen Phan Que Mai is a historical novel of the Vietnam War. It is told as a family saga from the point of view of a North Vietnamese family. Tran Dieu Lan is taking care of her granddaughter Huong, nicknamed Guava, while all of her children are away from home fighting for the Viet Ming. The story alternates between Dieu Lan's life as a child and the 1970s when she cares for her granddaughter by switching from an honorable small paying job as a teacher to a well paying but dishonorable job as a trader of food and sundries. It carries a risk though. Dieu Lan could be executed if she was caught. The story covers 100 years of Vietnamese history and is brutally honest in its telling. This is the author's first novel to be published in English. It has not been published in Vietnam because of censorship issues.

The author's life story is just as impressive as that of her heroines. Born in North Vietnam in 1973 she moved to the South when she was 6 in order to reunite her family. She lived there as a street seller and rice farmer until she obtained a scholarship to a university in Australia. Her research for the book included interviews with many Vietnamese citizens as well as her own family. She heard about the Land Reform Act which caused wealthy landowners to lose their property to their workers and resulted in Dieu Lan losing her ancestral home in the novel. The title refers to Dieu Lan telling her granddaughter that the challenges faced by the Vietnamese people throughout history are as tall as the tallest mountains. Dieu Lan's explanation to Huong that the government's refusal to allow discussion of past wrongs and events mirrors the current government's censorship of her book. Dieu Lan explains that such discussions can bring about the rewriting of history.

I learned alot about Vietnam from this book and highly recommend it. 5 out of 5 stars!

Salt Houses

Salt Houses is Hala Alyan's debut novel and it is terrific. The story follows several generations of the Yacoub family which originated in Jaffa, Israel and were displaced to Nablus, Palestine after Israel was created in 1948.  With the 1967 war they moved to Kuwait City and with each successive war they were displaced to Beirut, Amman, Paris and Boston.

The story opens in 1963 in Nablus, Palestine with the family matriarch Salma preparing coffee leaves to read for her daughter Alia who is about to marry Atef Yacoub. Salma sees in the dregs a drooping roof and houses that will be lost for her daughter and her future grandchildren but doesn't tell her daughter nor the women assembled what she sees.  Instead she says that she sees a baby coming in the first year.

Alia is a modern Arabic woman.  She does not wear a headdress like her sister Widad and her prayer life is fleeting when she is young.  She, Atef and her brother Mustafa are the best of friends and meet daily to smoke, drink and discuss the politics of the day.  Alia remembers a little about her family's life in the port of Jaffa on the Mediterranean Sea before the Israeli's forced them to leave and remembers her father never recovering emotionally from the loss. The family was middle class and did not end up in a refugee camp. They never would.  Their wealth would take care of them.

In 1965 Mustafa's visits to the local mosque change from being social to religious and political as an imam inspired him. However, when the war drums began pounding in 1967 Mustafa wanted to leave Palestine.  Atef called him a coward and off to war they went. In a few days they were in prison.  Atef never told his wife that it was his doing that kept them in Palestine and that Atef gave up Mustafa's name to the Israelis, who promptly killed him. 

After prison Atef moved himself and Alia permanently to Kuwait City to start a new life and a family of their own.  Each chapter focuses on a different family member at a different time in history to give the reader a seven decade history of this family.

Salt Houses is a different type of story about the displacement caused by war.  This family was wealthy and never ended up in a refugee camp. However, every few years they had to uproot themselves, find a house in a new city and somehow make it feel like home.

They placed importance on material possessions because there was nothing else permanent about their lives. Salma read Alia's coffee dregs in her first purchase as a wife in Nablus, a coffee set.  Salma cherished this set because the design pattern reminded her of the set her own mother gave her when she married, the set she had to leave behind in Jaffa.  This is typical behavior for the Palestinian diaspora; a girl receiving a piece of jewelry owned by an ancestor, etc...

I loved this family saga and while the story takes place in the past 70 years it is historical in that it shows the reader what life was/is like for the Palestinians.

Pachinko

I just finished reading Min Jin Lee's 2007 novel Free Food for Millionaires.  I loved it so I had to pick up her latest novel Pachinko.  It took the author 30 years to write this story and I am glad that she persevered.  It was wonderful.

The story involves 4 generations of a Korean family who originated in Pyongyang.  The novel covers the early 1900s through the 1980s. After Sunja Kim became a pregnant teen whose father refused to marry her, a Christian missionary lodging at her parents boardinghouse, Isak Baek, offers to marry her and take her to Osaka, Japan where he will be serving a church as its pastor.  The family had cared for him while he suffered a bout of tuberculosis during his stay.  The family feels this is a generous offer as Sunja and her baby will be ostracized if they stay.

Sunja and Isak leave North Korea for Japan where they will live with his brother Yoseb and Yoseb's wife Kyunghee.  Sunja and Kyunghee become fast friends and the newlyweds become accustomed to harsh discrimination from the Japanese who even Japanize their last name to Boku.  Koreans are believed to be a lesser sort of people and are treated accordingly by the Japanese. However, life is better for them in Japan because food is more prevalent.  Sunja gives birth to a son, Noa, and a year later gives birth to another son, Mozasu. Yoseb and Kyunghee treat them as their own as they are unable to have children.

Noa is smart at school and plans to take college entrance exams so that he can attend university.  Mazuso gets into alot of trouble for repeatedly fighting with Japanese classmates at school and is told to go work for a family friend who owns a couple of pachinko parlors.  There he blossoms but Noa is unhappy with the arrangement because he feels that it is beneath the family's dignity to be involved in pachinko.

Pachinko is a mechanical game that is both an arcade game and a gambling device which is popular in Japan.  It is similar to slot machines in Western casinos but operates differently.  Small steel balls are given to the operator to use inside the machine and they are both a bet and a payout.  Many pachinko parlors are run by Yazuki (organized crime).

I loved the characters in this novel, especially the women.  They had hard lives and were constrained by societal expectations of what a woman can do. Sunja got lucky with Isak.  They had a good marriage even though it was short. Kyunghee was barren but her husband stayed with her.  Sunja's mother, Yangjin, married Sunja's father Hoonie, who had physical disabilities, so that she would have food to eat but they had a good marriage too and ran a boardinghouse together.

The story moved along at a good pace. The plot grew out of the tumultuous lives of the characters who lived in an uncertain time for Koreans, both in Korea and in Japan. The Baek family's experiences with discrimination kept them at hands length from the Japanese as much as possible.  One wrong move by any of them and they could have been deported back to North Korea even though most of the family was born in Japan.  It did not make them Japanese citizens and it was difficult for Koreans to obtain Japanese citizenship.

This is a must read.

The Golden Son

The Golden Son is author Shilpi Somaya Honda's second novel.  It is the story of Anil Patel, the oldest son of his family in Panchanagar, India.  He is the first to read in his class and the first to memorize math tables.  While he is expected to inherit his father's farm one day, his father knows he will be a doctor and encourages him to continue his education.  When he is 17 he leaves home for medical college in Ahmabadab, leaving behind his family, friends and especially his best friend Leena.  After gaining acceptance into a medical residency at Parkview Hospital in Dallas, TX Anil leaves everyone behind and travels to the U. S.

Leena marries someone else while he is gone but the marriage is marred by her demanding husband and abusive in-laws.  Anil on the other hand struggles with adapting to American culture and the most difficult part of his life, being an intern at Parkland.  While he used to be good at everything it seems that Anil cannot get anything right in his new position.  A few years later Anil and Leena see each other again and struggle together with their past and present circumstances.

Loved, loved, loved this novel. The characters of Anil and Leena were sympathetic.  They both had heart wrenching challenges to deal with as they each broke with tradition in a different way. Their old-school parents Mina and Jayant Patel and Nirmala and Pradip were stereotypical Indian parents and I loved reading about all the cooking Mina did.  I wish I knew how to make those foods.  The family arguments between the Patel brothers was also interesting to watch as each tried to carve out their own destinies within the family business.

This family saga was fun reading.  Give it a try.  5 out of 5 stars!

Shelter

Shelter is a family saga about 2 generations of a Korean American family in America.  Kyung Cho is a husband and father of one son with financial problems due to not being able to live within his means.  After considering selling his house and moving back in with his wealthy parents who he does not get along with, tragedy strikes his parents and they become dependent upon him.  Kyung tries to re-enter their lives as he takes care of them but he is rejected and does not know why.  He believes that he is doing his duty as a Korean son.

Shelter shows the cultural differences of Korean Americans.  The way they think about family life, community life, and religion is clearly shown.  While the author was born in South Korea she was raised in North Dakota by her immigrant parents just as Kyung was.  She obviously knows what she is writing about here.  The story moved along at a good pace and much of the tension was between how differently Kyung perceived his duties compared to what his parents actually expected of him.

This was a lovely debut novel from Jung Yun and I am looking forward to reading more from her.

The Last Days of Cafe Leila

I received an ARC of this book through the Early Reviewers Club at Librarything. It is a story of three generations of the Yadegar family in post-revolutionary Iran.

Zod Yadegar has written his daughter Noor in California asking that she return home to Tehran where he runs the family business Cafe Leila.  She agrees to come and brings along her angry teenage daughter Lily.  Noor, a nurse, notices her father appears to be ill but is not aware how sick he is.  She soon learns he has terminal pancreatic cancer and decides to stay longer than the week she had originally planned to stay.  This, of course, upsets Lily who did not want to come to Tehran anyway.  While she is there, Noor gets reacquainted with longtime Cafe Leila employees Naneh Goli, Soli, and Ala who have always been considered family.

The family saga alternates between Noor's family problems, Zod's marriage and family life with Noor's mother Parvaneh, and Zod's parents Yanik and Nina who emigrated to Iran from Russia and opened Cafe Leila. Yanik and Nina created a tight family bond that begins to fall apart after Zod forced his children to leave Iran when they became college age and the country became too dangerous to live in. However, when Zod's kids return 30 years later the family bond appears to still be alive.

The setting of the restaurant and food is prominent.  All life problems seem to be solved by working hard to create an inviting place for their customers.  While Iran has changed over the years, Cafe Leila has not changed one bit and offers its customers a respite from a quickly changing society.

I loved this debut novel by Donia Bijan. The characters were loveable and I enjoyed reading about the history of this family through each generation's stories. The descriptions of the food served at the restaurant not only made me hungry but was also historical to the family.  Yanik brought his mother's recipes with him went he came to Iran.  Every aspect of this wonderful book is family related.

Highly recommended.