I liked this book very much. I liked it very much, but didn’t love it. Much of it was compelling and fascinating and, if accurate, gave me an illuminating view into an aspect or segment of women’s lives in South Korea that, arguably, my favorite Korean soap operas are not so likely to educate me about.

Many of the characters (it is a set of women in their twenties living in the same apartment building) are intriguing and draw you, but the author does seem to lose interest in some of them (the poor pregnant and married Wonna gets very short shrift) and become more interested in others, which makes one ask, should she just have written about those two? Also, a non-point of view character goes on to have an outsized (and mostly positive) influence on how things end for everyone and I rather wished we had gotten to hear her thoughts; she seemed pretty darn compelling, more so than some others.