I received a free ARC of this book from Netgalley in exchange for my honest review.

This book was a thoughtfully written perspective on grief, culture, and belonging against the backdrop of Korean folktales. Elsa is such a thought-provoking and complex main character, and her relationship to her family and culture raised so many questions (that are impossible to answer!). I'll be thinking about this for a while.

“These folktales also began and lived long as oral tradition, passed over generations—stolen notebooks and burning paper can’t kill these women.”

Thank you to Netgalley and Erewhon Books for the ARC of Folklorn by Angela Mi Young Hur. The following review is my own.


Elsa Park is a particle physicist stationed in Antarctica who’s sense of belonging there is shaken when her childhood imaginary friend suddenly returns. This reunion forces Elsa back into the chaos of her family where she begins to try and separate her mother’s stories of their Korean heritage between myth and history. While unraveling her mother’s secrets Elsa is faced with the truth of her family’s generational trauma, their history of mental illness, and the damage it has done to each of them.


So, do you ever finish a book and then sit there completely overwhelmed and unable to properly convey how it made you feel? That is 💯 how I feel upon finishing Folklorn. This is a heavy story in content and also, at times, in writing style, but it kept me on edge and invested through all of it. This lyrical story has so many layers that I know I will need to read it time and time again before I have any chance of coming close to truly understanding Elsa’s journey. I’m absolutely blown away by this book, and would highly recommend everyone look it up when it is released on April 27th. Folklorn gets five stars from me and I can’t wait to experience this story again and again.

This was a beautiful, highly introspective novel about the tension between physics and folklore, inherited trauma and love rediscovered through grief. It follows a Korean-American scientist named Elsa Park doing a physics post-doc in Antarctica and Sweden, who is called back to her childhood home in California following her mother's death. This novel is as heavy at times as it is tender at others, tackling issues of family, identity, belonging, and diaspora.

While the issues it covers are very real, I also loved the echos of magical realism that threaded through the novel, as Elsa follows a trail of her mother's Korean folktales in order to discover more about herself and her heritage. Below all of this, too, is a powerful message about womanhood and cycles of trauma throughout history, about mothers and daughters and familial wounds both intentional and accidental. It is interesting from both a philosophical and psychological perspective, ideas about nature vs. nurture intertwining with musings on culture and history. Some of the physics talk went over my head, but Angela Mi Young Hur generally does a brilliant job of translating complex science for a lay audience, with gorgeous prose besides.

This novel allowed me to meditate on heavy topics while also presenting an ending that felt hopeful. I look forward to allowing these ideas to settle, and re-reading this book in the future.

Folklorn was a thoughtful and lyrical tale. It took me a little longer than usual to get through it, but that was partly due to the time of year, with so much else going on, and the fact that it was a book I found myself pondering as I read, which slowed my reading speed. This story considers the idea of belonging and heritage, and whether that is genetic or a result of experience. Elsa's journey is woven through retellings of Korean folktales her mother used to read to her as a child, and we can see how she maps out her own history against those tales, sometimes blurring the lines between fact and fiction, so we question if what she is seeing and remembering is real or only in her head. It was a fascinating and captivating piece that was part family drama and part voyage of self-discovery, with a side serve of magical realism and folklore. Overall, this was a delightful and thought-provoking book, and I would be keen to read more from Angela Mi Young Hur in the future.

I received this book as a free eBook ARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Angela Mi Young Hur weaves a beautiful and lyrical story about the question on where you belong in her novel “Folklorn”. The story is quite philosophical and when reading the author is able to emote so many different feelings all connected to the large worldly questions on belonging, what a family is and how oneself is connected to something we can’t fully understand.

The character in the centre of all this is Elsa Park, a Korean-American physicist and the story around her is set both in the past and in the present and is connected through folktales from Elsa’s childhood. She is on a journey to discover her identity – at least that is what I took from the text – and it shows how hard the topic of identity really is and how much we put into knowing exactly who we are at all times.

Living in Stockholm, and having been a student at Stockholm university, the sort of outsider look on Swedish culture and – well – identity was interesting to take part of too.

I really enjoyed “Folklorn”. It made me think a lot on difficult questions which is something I, personally, really enjoy in things I read. I want to be challenged a bit and being able to reflect on the book I just read and this novel did just that.

This was a tough read for me, and it's possible that it's all on me. I will not be reviewing this book off of NetGalley until I have a print copy in my hands because I believe a lot of my issues will feel less important once I have a better sense of things like where I am in the story, and how the pieces fit together, and other things that seem to translate better when I have a physical book instead of an ebook.

Even as an ebook I could appreciate many of the scenes, and there were parts that seemed really brilliant to me, but I also felt the story would veer away from what I wanted to know more about, a little too quickly. The author provided a lot of detail and a great deal of back story in other cases where I felt I didn't need quite that much information, and where I felt the amount of detail dragged on the story instead of providing vivid realism.

I have had feelings like this about an electronic ARC before that then go away when I'm reading a print book and can see how the parts balance, and I'll try again post-publication.