A genre-bending story that captures the diaspora experience with a beautiful touch of magical realism
—Amanda Khong, Bookish Brews
Bookish Brews Snapshot
Folklorn by Angela Mi Young Hur
Elsa has spent her whole life and career running away from her family’s folktales toward the rigidity of math and science. But after an accident, she realizes that it isn’t so easy to run away from your family, your home, and your heritage.
📖 Couldn't Put It Down 😭 Emotional 🌳 Family Focused 🧭 Immigrant Experience
- Genre: Literary Fiction, Speculative Fiction
Book Review
painful, grief-filled, magical, accepting, validating, beautiful, emotional, stunning
Folklorn was just way more personal to me than I anticipated it to be. It was…. incredibly surprising how close to home it felt. Elsa grew up near me, and I grew up where her Swedish home’s people often emigrate to. I even almost ran to physics as well. Incredibly precise, and almost impossible for me to not rate this so highly. Angela Mi Young Hur was speaking directly to me!
Folklorn follows a Korean-American physicist, running away from the culture and folktales of her family and grounding herself in the solid concrete nature of science. Only to find out that you can’t escape your history, and science reflects our lives more than we think.
I honestly don’t even know how to review this book. It was beautiful, challenging, eye-opening. The integration of physics to ground Elsa, and to ground me, with the magical exploration of long-told and oft-lost folktales was stunning. Elsa’s search for herself pushed me to also search for myself within the pages, only to find myself just about as well as she did, in a constant journey.
Every little bit of this book is important, and I felt I couldn’t miss anything. From the mention of permanent makeup, especially eyebrows, to communities of immigrants giving each other loans to buy houses and start businesses. Small moments giving us a glimpse into these important, beautiful, communities. Seeing how people are able to band together and grow together by helping each other out in these communities really highlights the importance of the communities we build. All the way down to the moment where we realize that those of us of the diaspora have full right to the stories of our ancestors. It is all deeply important.
Anyway, I feel that I can’t put into words how this book felt so close to me so I will just say: go read it. It’s wonderful.
Book Club Question
- Discuss the dichotomy of the folktales of Elsa’s mother and the rigidity of science. How did they compliment each other?
- At what point did Elsa’s experience feel the most real to you? Can anyone who has ever moved to a new place relate in any way?
- How did the inclusion of Oskar’s character, as a transracial adoptee, compliment Elsa’s experience of a Korean American in Sweden? How did their experiences differ? How were they the same?
