Only if you read at an advanced level. Please Look After Mom is literary prose told in shifting voices, and those shifts make it demanding, but its family subject makes the effort feel worthwhile for strong readers.
- Level
- Advanced
- Format
- Book
- Year
- 2008
Why it works for learners
Shin Kyung-sook's novel moves between members of one family, each with a way of recalling the same missing woman. That gives you a compact course in family language, including the terms children and spouses use and the feelings Koreans often leave unsaid. Parts of it address the reader's character directly as "you", an unusual device that keeps you alert. It is also a window on the gap between rural parents and their city children, an important theme in Korean life.
What makes it hard
The changing point of view is the main obstacle, since reviewers in translation also found the second-person voice hard to settle into. Memories jump around in time without warning, and older rural life brings words for food and farming you will rarely meet in textbooks.
How to use it
Read one chapter section at a time and, before starting a new chapter, work out who is speaking and to whom. Keep a family-terms list. Read the English translation of a chapter afterwards, only as a check on what you missed.
More for Korean learners: our Korean guides.
Keep it where you'll see it
Save Please Look After Mom and log every episode or chapter toward your Korean hours. Free for one language.
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