By Mandakini Arora
Originally published in Korean in 2022, the best-selling Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop has been on my radar since it was translated into English. Hwang Bo-Reum and her translator, Shanna Tan, spoke at the Singapore Writers’ Festival 2024. Our AWA evening book club discussed the book. Loving books and bookstores, my expectations were high as I started the book about a woman opening a bookstore where new friendships are forged, book discussions take place, and lives change.
Yeongju quits a successful career — “something was siphoning her soul away,” driven to open her own bookstore. The Hyunam-Dong Bookshop is off the beaten track in Seoul, and she must learn on the job how to attract custom and keep body and soul together. Clearly struggling with some past sadness, she is initially “nailed to her chair looking like she has a screw loose, as if she belongs in the hospital instead,” an early customer, “Mincheol’s mother,” observes. Joy slowly returns. Reading all day — particularly books about “people who walked away from their lives” — saves her. She proactively builds her business.
The characters peopling the book are endearing. The bookstore’s barista, Minjun, a formerly driven university student whose mother is goading him to get a real job. Eighteen-year-old Mincheol, adrift, unable to find meaning in life. Mincheol’s mother, worried about her son. Jimi, the supplier of coffee beans to the bookstore, unhappily married to “that man.” Jungsuh, disillusioned by a toxic job she has quit, who crochets for hours sitting in the bookstore. The permanently tired-looking blogger and author Seongwoo, whose life balance has been disrupted since the success of his book and whom Yeongju invites to speak at the bookstore.
These variously ruffled souls make new connections in or through the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop.
A lovely story, centered on books, with lovable characters and happy endings should have made for an engaging novel. But the writing style detracted from the story. There was too much telling when something had already been shown. I skimmed over the characters’ long back stories, often told in a journalistic style, and over excessive descriptions of their feelings. Lengthy speeches in dialogues felt like the author using the characters as vehicles for her own opinions on happiness, love, books, and work, among other subjects.
If you can get past the style, the premise of Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop is inspiring and uplifting.
 | Mandakini Arora co-chairs the Writers’ Group of the American Women’s Association, Singapore, and reviews books for their online magazine. As travelling_bookmark, she shares book news on Instagram. With a PhD in History from Duke University and an MA in Creative Writing from LASALLE College of the Arts, she is a collector and writer of women’s stories. She welcomes comments on the books she reviews: mandakinni@gmail.com |
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