Maybe shadows are a larger plot device in more stories based in Asia, since I happened to read two books back to back about shadows having a life and mind of their own. I thought this was just “fine.”

The shadows were more malevolent in nature than I was expecting, but I actually liked that. I never felt like I really knew what the main character wanted or what was happening, and there were a lot of disjointed storylines, and chapters were almost like separate essays within the novella. But it was very solidly magical realism with some questions about capitalism that were definitely worth considering. And though the story felt a little disjointed, it ended in such a way that I actually flipped back to the beginning chapter to see how well it matched up, because it felt so circular in nature, which was really cool with how that lined up. And though horror isn’t exactly a genre I would classify this as, it did end up feeling like an indie horror film, where everything is just a little unsettling and you don’t get answers. If you enjoy magical realism, this is a quick little read. Though I ultimately didn’t love this one, it was fine as a read!

Eungyo and Mujae are employees of a derelict market spreading over several buildings and intricate alleyways. Their life goes on while around them shadows grow. Literally. No one knows exactly what prompts someone’s shadow to rise, but on no account should anyone follow their shadow.
This haunting novel is short but very atmospheric. There is no plot so to speak, but you are invited rather to amble along with the main characters, witness their growing attachment for each other, and check from time to time what your shadow is doing behind your back. It could have been a very noisy novel, full of high stakes and dramatic plot points. I’m quite happy with the path chosen by the author to keep everything very quiet and subdued. It is very slightly creepy, but again, nothing spectacular, always with nuance. Although I have aphantasia and didn’t picture much, I thought it would make a great indie movie because of the novel’s visual potential.

A short and weird novella about rising shadows and tenant displacement. It was tough to get through for such a short book.

Scrolling through the sci-fi/fantasy section of NetGalley puts a lot of books in front of me that aren’t necessarily part of my usual niches. Occasionally, those books are still intriguing enough to try out. In the case of One Hundred Shadows by Hwang Juengun, translated by Jung Yewon, the combination of acclaim in the original language, my previous enjoyment of other translations published by Erewhon, and the unintimidating novella length pushed me to give it a try. 

One Hundred Shadows is firmly within the realm of literary fiction and magical realism, opening with the main character’s shadow detaching—something we are assured is dangerous and has led to death in many other cases—before moving into a story that’s much more about the uncertainty of the leads working in electronics shops in a building slated for demolition. There’s a bit of romance, a bit of slice-of-life, a bit of commentary on the way new urban developments can leave the marginalized scrambling for answers, and yes, a bit of magic. 

One Hundred Shadows follows what I’m told to be a recent litfic trend of eschewing quotation marks and leaving dialogue tags to a minimum, which can make extended conversations disorienting, especially for a reader not familiar with Korean naming conventions who may have extra difficulty remembering which character is which. But the story still generates a haunting, somber mood, with so many unsettling stories about shadows lurking in the background and the specter of redevelopment lingering over the principal characters. 

But while it’s clear that this is a story with something to say about the people whose fates are ignored by the developers seeking to tear down their workplaces, it’s not really a story with a clear narrative arc. Instead, it flits in and out of small moments in the characters’ lives, their walks and lunches together, their swapping of urban legends and stories about neighbors and relatives, and even some musings from the owners of the little shops that had become neighborhood institutions but are slated for destruction. Without a doubt, the big events color the individual moments, so it’s always clear just how the people on the ground are affected. And these small scenes are all well-written and engaging in their own right, and there is enough cohesion to see how the characters change over the course of the story. 

And yet, despite the shadows and the impending destruction of the complex where the characters work, these small slices of life feel a bit disjointed, touching on the same topics but not really feeling unified by them. Perhaps the most unifying feature—at least from a plot perspective—is a slow-burn romance between the leads, but even that feels like a subplot and not like the point of the novella. Instead of any main plot arc, it’s a story that invites the reader to sample these mundane parts of everyday life, reflecting on the lives of ordinary people and how those lives are changed by city-planning decisions over which they have no control. 

And while I tend to like ordinary people stories, and I certainly don’t mind theme-heavy stories, I felt myself wanting a little more to tie it together. The pieces are all there, with engaging scenes and a compelling and thought-provoking overall theme, but it felt less like a story and more like little pieces of story held together by theme and mood. I’m not a regular litfic reader, so maybe that’s the sort of story that will hit hard for readers accustomed to that sort of structure. But for me, it just needed a bit more cohesion. 

Recommended if you like: slice-of-life, literary fiction, theme-driven stories.

Overall rating: 13 of Tar Vol's 20. Three stars on Goodreads.

Unsettling, beautiful, and darkly lyrical. The riding shadows in this book give the everyday reality a haunting, dreamlike tilt.

One hundred shadows was an unexpectedly immersive read for me. Set in the slums of Seoul, this novel follows Eungyo and Mujae as their lives delicately and hauntingly intertwine. It felt like flipping through a diary where reality blends seamlessly with the surreal.

The story leaves a lot for interpretation, making me think deeply almost after every chapter. If you ask me, the rising shadows hinted at a looming end or demise, a subtle yet powerful sign of change. The minimalist storytelling felt raw and real, capturing the essence of life on the fringes of society.

If you love books that focus more on emotions and atmosphere than a straightforward plot, this one might be for you.

I really enjoyed this book! It did leave me wanting more, but in the best way. I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in social commentary with a sprinkle of light romance.

I, too, fear my shadow will rise.

Set in a group of decaying slum buildings in Seoul earmarked for demolition and urban renewal, this novel describes the lives of those clinging on to their small businesses and being forced to moved on. They are the poor working class of modern Korea, those who work hard but earn little, living on the margins of society. The events are told through two young people, Eungyo and Mujae who have dropped out of school/college who work there as shop assistants in electronic repair shops. The type of shop where you could take old appliances to get fixed rather than throwing them out and buying the latest shiny new model. Eungyo and Mujae become friends, mostly sharing food together, and there is a hint they may become something more eventually

The prose is sparse, painting a picture of these lives, simple but without purpose and filled with unrest and unease about the future. There is much talk of shadows rising, typically before people die. Eungyo and Mujae discuss seeing their own shadows rising and being careful not to follow them, perhaps as a metaphor for a phenomenon linked to the distress and depression they are feeling at being pushed aside in the name of development. This is a strange and offbeat tale, not one with a happy ending, but a realistic one, commenting on the drive for progress for the wealthy classes while leaving the poor behind.

This is a genuinely interesting little collection, as they're framed as stories told by two young lost kids wandering through a creepy forest. Quietly surreal and creepy, and a fun summer read.

The lack of quotation marks threw me off and I couldn't recover. It was also a little bleak for me and what I want from my books at the moment, so it wasn't the right time for me to read this.

3.5/4

A strange book that mixes reality and fantasy. Muzae and Eungyo have both dropped out of school to work in a repair shop. However the area they work in is being slowly re-developed and the shop keepers who seem to sell everything you could possibly wish for are constantly moving making their livelihoods even more precarious.

Add to this the strange phenomenon of the shadow of a person rising before they die. Both Muzae and Eungyo see their own shadows rise and know not to follow them but their lives seem to hang by the thinnest thread.

I enjoyed reading this book but I'm still not sure why. It seemed to be saying a lot more than I understood but I'm unfamiliar with Korean literature, lives and folklore so could not say whether any of the themes are based on traditional Korean tropes.

I would recommend this book for fans of strange and different literature. It certainly gives a flavour of the fleeting and insubstantial nature of our lives.

Thankyou to Netgalley and Kensington Books for the advance review copy.

Special thanks to NetGalley and Kensington Books | Erewhon Books for the ARC copy they provided.

Picking up One Hundred Shadows for the first time, I was not expecting the style of the writing. Part of me is never prepared for the lack of quotation marks around spoken dialog, or the lack of dialog tags. For perhaps the first half page, the style felt off putting. Then I got lost in the story and couldn’t care less about the style. After encountering Eungyo, the main character, and her shadow and Mujae, Eungyo’s counterpart and love interest, One Hundred Shadows carried me away.

It carried me away to the point I barely noticed the speed with which I was reading this book. In the space of twenty-four hours, Eungyo and Mujae had shown me their whole world and moved on out of my sight when the pages ran out, and I was left wanting more. One Hundred Shadows begins in the midst of a story, and ends the same, the way life does. It is a perfect snippet in time, and I am here, days after completing my read, still wanting more.

I won’t get it and that is the point, but the want is still there.

And that desire for more is what a good book should leave a reader with. A whole story, with no “beginning” and no “end” that still has the capacity to linger in the mind, niggling that there is something more.
One Hundred Shadows is beautifully written and beautifully crafted and I recommend it wholeheartedly.

Thank you to Erewhon Books, Kensington Books, and NetGalley for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Hwang Jeungeun’s novella One Hundred Shadows follows Mujae and Eungyo who work at an electronics market set for demolition. They live in a reality where their shadows are independent entities. The permeance of shadows in the work makes the book’s structure and direction feel disjointed and uncertain at times, mirroring the uncertainty surrounding the characters’ future. Hwang’s work is an experimental take on poverty through a magical realism lens.

I really enjoyed this haunting, evocative novella about the working poor. Eungyo and Mujae both work in different parts of an electronics market earmarked for demolition in an area of the city outsiders consider a “slum”. The realism of this milieu is supplemented by a fantastical premise: shadows can act independently of their owners, luring them away with the promise of relief. The people at the margins of society, the people who gentrifiers don’t see as inhabiting and working in these so-called “slums”, are drawn towards their shadows, struggling to resist the pull towards a life free of debt and difficult work. It’s a social commentary that doesn’t feel overly didactic thanks to the magical realism. It’s also a tender look at a blossoming relationship between two very different people - one who is naive about the way power and wealth operates, and one who is cynical and hardened. Really interesting work; a lot is packed into a short novella, and it’s beautifully written and translated. Told in vignettes, it sometimes felt a bit slippery and formless to me, but the eeriness and despair (punctuated by tenderness and descriptions of delicious food) made it a good read.

This book is slim, but was a very thought-provoking read. The setting and circumstances in the story are pretty bleak, but I thought the story was hopeful overall.

A lot of the time, I was wondering what exactly the author intended and how readers should interpret choices like repetitive language and the lack of punctuation marks. While the main themes in the story are easily accessible, I'm not sure I picked up on all the social commentary that the author also included. It wasn't until I was researching the book after I finished it (because I could not stop thinking about it) that I saw some readers believe the book was based on or inspired by the Yongsan Disaster in 2009, and event I'm ashamed to say I didn't even know about.

I think this book is interesting, and will be great for readers who enjoy something thought-provoking and they don't mind if the story takes some strange twists and turns. They are intrigued and will stick along for the ride.

I was really fascinated reading about the inspiration for this novel as well as the author's own words to describe it. A magical realism, small fantasy about the plight of the poor in the face of consumerism. Overall I liked it, though I thought the themes were a little heavy-handed at times and the dialogue was hard to follow. I believe the latter may just be due to ARC formatting.

This is a beautiful book about ordinary people; or it's an ordinary book about beautiful people. It's something all its own, delicate but never prettifed, earnest and honest but never winsome. It's a love story haunted by loss and precarity, but it's in those particular threats that much of the beauty lies. If shadows are basic evidence of our presence in the world, then the premise that here, characters' shadows are rising, departing, suggests that the people themselves are fading -- or, better, being erased.

Set around a sprawling, ad-hoc secondhand electronics market that is getting pushed out and bulldozed under, the book is perfectly clear-eyed about the social forces at work even as its characters struggle to understand. That applies, actually, equally well to the larger, unspoken things, like trust and affection, as they develop and tremble into being. Eungyo and Mujae, the protagonists, are drawn to each other and their relationship grows cautiously, tremulously, as they work to connect and know each other; there's no sense of narrative inevitability, as usually happens with romance, just two people existing together.

So much is provisional and contingent, whether that's emotion or the place you work and live. In the end, gentrification is every bit as unnatural, strange and unsettling as shadows leaving. I'm not recovering from how beautifully this book establishes people, their place, and their needs, nor how well it illuminates the transient, possibly futile efforts to flourish within precarity.

This was a stunning novella that has made me on the lookout for the future works by the author. It took a little while to get into, but once I was hooked, I finished the rest of the novella in one sitting. The supernatural elements really tired in with the writing style and I found myself wanting more.

One Hundred Shadows by Hwang Jungeun is a compelling read that combines urban grit with elements of dark magical realism. The detailed setting and the metaphorical use of shadows provide a profound commentary on depression and societal marginalization. While the slow-burn romance adds warmth, the novel's lack of a clear conclusion and sometimes confusing dialogue may leave readers with mixed feelings. Despite these flaws, Jungeun's unique storytelling and atmospheric prose make One Hundred Shadows a memorable exploration of life's shadows and the light that can emerge within them.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing this e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you Net Galley for providing this e arc. Unfortunately I did not enjoy this book. The pacing was off as well as the mood of the book. The characters felt flat as well as the premise