This was a very ambitious book and I enjoyed the writing a lot ! I cant wait to have a physical copy so I can annotate it .

Thank you for the Arc.

The Melancholy of Untold History reveals a people and its individuals who seek to confront the hardships of life through storytelling. Mixing the East Asian mythos with a postmodern approach to standard sci-fi/fantasy narrative tropes, Minsoo Kang has created a challenging, beautiful, sad, humorous, and ultimately unforgettable novel of love, grief, and myth-making.

This was fine. It had potential for greatness, but it was too short and too flat to reach it.

I had a difficult time connecting with this from the outset and was not able to finish it - I think others will enjoy this unconventional narrative, but it was not for me, unfortunately.

Oh boy, when your book gets comped to Babel you know you have big shoes to fill!
Unfortunately, this book did not do that. In fact, I found myself DNF-ing by the 50% mark. I just could not go on. The different timelines were not executed well and I could not find a character to form any sort of attachment to.

I’m very thankful for having received an ARC but I got 20% of the way in and I just could not finish this book. There was nothing really gripping about it and I struggled to get to that 20%.

This book was a DNF. The main character really bothered me and because of that I could barely care about the story at all.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

I really liked the book's initial premise, in where a China-esque country's mythological past, historical past, and present-day each were given their own storylines that quickly intertwined with one another. I also enjoyed the mythological plot and how it blended with the historical elements. Unfortunately, I found the present-day plot to be the weak from its very start, and it made the book the equivalent of an unbalanced three-legged stool. Also, while I applaud Minsoo Kang's creative efforts with the addition of several meta elements, their execution ended up falling a little flat especially at the very end. Overall, I just found "The Melancholy of Untold History" to end up being much less than the sum of all of its initial parts.

From one of my most anticipated reads of 2024 to one of the biggest flops of 2023 with a DNF at 34%, I'm thinking perhaps my expectations were a little too high for "The Melancholy of Untold History". And yet, when a book is marketed with parallels to Babel and Cloud Cuckoo Land, its easy to believe a story is a masterpiece in the making.

The premise of the dual timelines, contrasting between the bygone tale of a storyteller weaving tales to appease his emperor and a historian struggling with the grief of his deceased wife, was promising, but the execution has fallen flat on both fronts.

The tales of the four mythical Mountain deities told by the storyteller is by far the more compelling timeline; I enjoyed the snippets within the stories that showed the storyteller prolonging his enterprise, with lines speaking of future adventures and spin-offs. But the main storyline featuring the gods/goddesses felt immensely rushed; details were glazed over, emotions ran high and fast never to simmer, and the characterization of these characters were rigidly one-dimensional. And unfortunately this was the good part of the story.

For the perspective of the historian, his story was completely saturated in the many flavors of misogyny. From the Pick-Me Boy attitude of "[the historian] [was] not like anyone she had ever dated before....she had never been with someone of such depth", to the poorly written dead wife lauded as the most fantastically fictional "She was...a self-made millionaire who started her own NGO" (for a story written by a historian, it was surprising to see the falsities of self-made millionaires stated as fact, but perhaps the bar for becoming a historian is quite low), to the protégé of the historian who slept with him in his grief because "it was such a natural role for her to play", these chapters were painful to read. The dialogue between characters felt like a vessel for exposition, resulting in heavily clinical language usage and flat character development.

I felt like this book held immense promise but personally the storyteller's tales could've been fleshed out more, the infidelity of the protégé could've been explained as a power imbalance instead of boorish sexism, the grief of the historian could've been expanded further, to start. If there had been tighter editing and maybe some sensitivity readers, I could've seen this book being more. Unfortunately, what it is right now is not worth reading.