Another beautiful, heartfelt and soul filling book! I devoured this book, one evening and I will be recommending it to all my students! My new go to author.

If you’re a fan of the tv series “ the Great Pottery Throwdown”, then this is the book for you! The story follows Jungmin, who after suffering a burnout happens across a pottery workshop. I found this a very heartwarming book although I felt some of the back stories a little neglected. There was scope for more character details and some of the storylines felt a little rushed. However, if you’re after an easy read, with a wholesome feel to it, then you’ll really enjoy this.

I don’t normally, read this kind of book. However, I was pleasantly surprised.

Jungmin is such a relatable character, with her struggles and finding herself, I liked her backstory as well. The fact she gains, an animal companion (Hoya), also warmed my heart. I would recommend this book, to friends and family and I want to read more from this author,

This was a very sweet book, with a soft, gently flowing storyline. I did, however, find it quite hard to connect to the characters. I thought Jungmin could have done with more depth - we learn that she's quit her job and is now in a funk before she comes across the workshop. However, we never really learn much about her, her passions, her drivers, her ambitions. It's almost there but not quite. It's as if there's a milky filter over the book - it's soft, gentle and calm, but a little bit fuzzy around the edges and slow.

"The Healing Season of Pottery" by Yeon Somin is a beautifully introspective and emotionally resonant novel that delves into themes of healing, self-discovery, and the transformative power of art. Somin’s writing is gentle yet profound, creating a narrative that speaks to the heart while exploring the quiet, restorative qualities of pottery as both an art form and a metaphor for life.

The story follows a protagonist who, perhaps after experiencing a significant loss or emotional turmoil, retreats to a small village known for its pottery. There, they become immersed in the craft, learning the delicate and meticulous process of shaping clay into beautiful, functional pieces. Through the act of creating pottery, the protagonist embarks on a journey of healing and self-reflection, discovering how the patience and care required in pottery can mirror the process of mending a broken heart or spirit.

Somin’s portrayal of the protagonist’s emotional journey is deeply moving, capturing the slow but steady process of healing that comes from finding solace in a craft. The novel’s setting, likely filled with serene landscapes and a tight-knit community, enhances the feeling of peace and refuge that the protagonist seeks. The characters are thoughtfully developed, each contributing to the protagonist’s growth in meaningful ways, whether through friendship, mentorship, or shared experiences.

"The Healing Season of Pottery" is a perfect read for those who enjoy literary fiction that focuses on personal growth, the beauty of simplicity, and the quiet strength found in creative expression. Yeon Somin has crafted a novel that is both meditative and uplifting, offering readers a reminder of the healing power that lies in the things we create with our hands and the connections we form along the way. This book is a must-read for anyone seeking a story of renewal, art, and the gentle process of putting the pieces of one’s life back together.

This is such a beautifully uplifting new addition to the healing fiction genre. Written in the vein of other "burnout to peaceful thriving" novels (Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop, What You Are Looking for Is in the Library), the Healing Season of Pottery feels like a balm for the soul. The plot isn't exactly gripping, but it feels like a slow, peaceful return to joyful living. I'm looking forward to recommending this to more readers upon publication.

A cosy story perfect for a rainy day ! I enjoyed the wholesomeness of this read, and the premise that healing isn't always linear and can sometimes come from the most unexpected of places. I didn't find the writing particularly gripping, and it was a book I definitely found myself getting distracted easily from reading, however if you are looking for a cute story that doesn't require too much thinking, this is a read for you!

The story is about Jungmin, a woman in her thirties recovering from burnout. As she gathers the strength to leave her house, she discovers a pottery workshop called Soyo, where she meets new people and becomes part of a close-knit community.

The book unfolds as a healing experience and journey of self-reflection for Jungmin as she grapples with her identity and past trauma. The vivid descriptions create an immersive setting in Chesnut Burr Village, and the cultural differences add depth to the story.

Despite the excellent translation, it sometimes feels like a literal translation, losing some of the original magic. Additionally, the point of view changes without reason, and the writer introduces many backstories without proper follow-through. This might be due to differences in storytelling conventions between cultures. Still, it doesn't detract from the story’s quality or whether we prefer protagonists who find themselves on a solo journey or those who find themselves through finding love.

This book is a good choice if you're looking for a heartwarming, easy-to-read story.

I received a copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.

I have no particularly strong feelings about this one, it was a better read than a lot of the other translated novels I've read - so I do think it was a pretty good translation but I wasn't super engrossed with the story.

I enjoyed the setting of the pottery studio and seeing Jungmin slowly come back to life once she found a new passion and a community. It had a nice message about how old trauma can linger and it's through giving yourself grace and connection that we can often find the solace needed to begin to heal and the pottery studio setting really worked as a perfect backdrop and metaphor for the story.

I don't have much else to say, unfortunately, while not a personal fav it's still one I can see recommending over the other Korean novels I've read.

Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin General UK for an arc in exchange for an honest review!

a heartwarming story full of found family and the pursuit of happiness - left me with a warm fuzzy feeling

I enjoyed this read I didn't really know that healing fiction was a thing before reading this book and I did really enjoy this read and for sure will be reading more books in that genre and also books by this author.

It is official - I prefer Korean 'healing novels' to Japanese cat/Ghiblicore/twee ones. Having thoroughly enjoyed Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop, I was delighted when my request for The Healing Season of Pottery was approved. Healing novels follow quite a specific formula/structure - the main character is rethinking their life by engaging in a wholesome activity such as running a bookshop, learning how to cook, opening a laundromat or discovering a new hobby. In this one, the protagonist joins a local pottery class. Close relatives of this type of novel are Western cosy fantasy (eg Legends and Lattes), cottagecore paperback romances (think those endless Cornish village books), Hallmark movies and Japanese cat/bookshop/coffeshop novels.

In The Healing Season of Pottery, we follow Jungmin, a woman who completely collapsed in her writing for broadcasting job and got a writers' block which sent her into deep depression and a life of a hermit. She stays in her silent one-bedroom apartment, she threw away the TV, she doesn't cook, she doesn't talk to anybody and she rarely leaves her flat. She discovers a local pottery class and slowly, little by little, rediscovers her will to live.

What sets the Korean ones apart, including The Healing Season of Pottery, is a more reserved exploration of emotions, a slower pace, coupled with slightly longer runtimes, which allows the reader to get to know not just the protagonist, but also their community, and, crucially, a focus on societal issues. American and British versions of this concept tend to be quite mindless ventures, whereas the Japanese ones focus on the supposedly 'universal' values and experiences, such as first love, grief or pride in one's work. We see the depressed characters in isolation, not as a part of a society which might have driven them into depression in the first place. The sort of anti-capitalist, or feminist messages Korean healing novels convey (not very forcefully, but they do convey them nevertheless) are reserved for the 'weird feminism' novels such as Sayaka Murata's works in Japan. In the Korean stories, the authors tend to be much more open about the societal specifics of what exactly drove the characters into depression.

In this one, I really appreciated the exploration of the predatory nature of broadcasting, the protagonist's former job. I also appreciated the extent to which both the protagonist and the author recognise the utter privilege of being able to just stop one's life for a year and live off savings without a job. Most depressed people don't get a chance to stay secluded in a flat which allows for privacy for months on end. I also loved the details of the reality of running a pottery class as a small business, including the discussion of the importance of Instagram. It was idealised and romanticised, but at least we got a glimpse of the economic reality of 'following your dreams'.

I wasn't sold on the romance, I was not sure what it added to the story. As a bonus, I am always suspicious of romances built on the love interest's breakup with their current partner. It was handled tactfully here, the protagonist was not the cause of the breakup, but I wasn't sure what Ara the girlfriend added to the story in the first place.

This is not a literary novel, so don't expect interest prose, or a deep exploration of human nature, or anything original in the narrative itself. As a novel, this is probably closer to 3 stars, but as a healing novel, it is really well-executed, so within its genre it is definitely a 4 star work.

This beautiful novel will stay in my mind for a long time! I admit I have become obsessed with the recent trend of healing fiction because of its heartwarming, community-led message. But THE HEALING SEASON OF POTTERY stands out to me because after many bookshop and cafe set novels in this space, this book offers a fresh take on the genre, centered around learning a new skill in order to find a way back into the world. A truly healing reading experience!

This was incredibly sweet and gentle, and really just a lovely book. It's a story of burnout, and of rejuvenation and finding joy in life again through creation, which I adore. It's very cosy, making it perfect for autumn/winter, reading under a blanket on a rainy day. I admit that I struggled to keep my focus as the book went on, despite it being a very short book at just over 250 pages, but it did make me want to go and try a pottery class!

I was in the mood for some gentle, healing fiction but this book really didn’t work for me.

What I liked:
👍 The cover art was inviting. While I think I prefer the North American cover (the cat is so cute!), I think this cover is more representative of the focus.
👍 When I started reading this book, the writing and descriptions in the first chapter calmed and comforted me.
👍 I liked the Hoya thread and wished we’d spent more time on it (maybe I prefer the ‘healing power of cats’ theme 🤔).
👍 Some of the descriptions of coffee and food were very well done.
👍 Even though I have zero interest in pottery, I found myself getting immersed in it!

Where it let me down:
👎 The book was boring. I’m not sure if it was trying to do too much and that’s why the characters, plot, and threads felt too surface level but nothing about this book grabbed or held my attention: characters felt more like caricatures than real people, threads (like Hoya) were introduced and dropped, time skips felt clunky and random.
👎 This is the first healing fiction I’ve read with an overt romance theme and I didn’t like it. It wasn’t empowering and felt like a weird theme for a healing fiction book. It might be a personal preference, but I prefer when women reconnect with themselves and prioritize their self-love as part of healing.
👎 Couldn’t connect with the instagram focus - sometimes, it felt more like Marketing for Social Media 101 than a novel. There was also way too much about characters’ jobs/schooling or characters whose only identity seems to be a job/schooling.
👎 Jungmin wasn’t an appealing character to me. She felt woefully immature (still bitter about elementary school, only realizing at 30+ that her mother is a person, etc.). But, that aside, Jungmin’s internalized capitalism was the most frustrating thing about her character. She’d collapsed under burnout and spent the better part of a year housebound but was so judgmental of others for not grindmaxing (when she first met Gisik) but held resentment toward her mom for working all the time. I will never understand the toxic relationship some folks have with jobs, according to Jungmin: “A seven-day weekend was a bottomless swamp of inertia.” Look at the word choices there: bottomless (insinuating sinking, falling), swamp (gross, mucky, sucking), inertia (lack of movement). God forbid we rest, recover, or *gasp* enjoy ourselves and find joy, solace, and peace not being at a job. 🙄 This book doesn’t have any commentary or criticism of capitalism (compared to the wonderful Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop which did this beautifully) but came across as more apologist which really didn’t work for me.
👎 Toward the end, the book takes a swerve into the religious too, which was weird.

While I felt this book lacked charm, focus, and has too strange priorities to work as a healing fiction novel, perhaps romance or women’s fiction readers might enjoy this more than I did. 🤷‍♀️

I was privileged to have my request to read this book accepted through NetGalley. Thanks for letting me give it a try, Penguin, Viking.

A heartfelt story about finding your place and a slice of comfort in the serenity of loosing yourself in craft, The Healing Season of Pottery will keep you cosy!

There is such love in this novel about Jungmin finding herself and healing from her past. The narrative is told slowly, but with good pace like unraveling a spool of tread, or dare I say, shaping a vase on a potter’s wheel?

The characters are all lovely and you’ll want to cheer for them throughout even as you learn about their pasts and their unique struggles. This is one to curl up with a tea in your favourite mug.

Yeon Somin’s "The Healing Season of Pottery" is a poignant and beautifully crafted novel that explores the transformative power of art and the resilience of the human spirit.

This novel started off well with a lot of potential for the rest of the story. We meet Jungmin, an overworked, burned out broadcast writer. She has quit her job and moved to Ilsan, to Chestnut Burr Village. She is exhausted and has been living as a non-existent person, until one day she goes for a walk and stumbled upon Soyo, what looks like a hidden cafe but is actually a pottery workshop. She meets Johee, the owner who makes her a cup or coffee.

Here begins her journey to starting learning how to make pottery. Learning how to properly shape clay, as an extension of her own hands, bonding with the other pottery members, slowly regaining her sense of self and recovering from burnout. From the beginning to the middle of the book, it was easy to read and I wanted to continue on Jungmin’s journey. I learned, as she did, the challenges and pitfalls to shaping pottery, the patience needed, the time in the kiln and how some pieces won’t make it. It is an ode to devotion, and has parallels to the life Jungmin begins living.

Throughout the book, there is a lot of over-explaining within the writing. For example, when she accidentally drops Gisik’s, another workshop goer, ring as she has been using his apron. This happens throughout the novel and makes it a bit boring to read.

There are also metaphors on every other page and they are strange. For example, worry spreading like liver spots across an old man’s wrinkled face, or feeling like a tile in a decor brochure, an expensive alluring tile. Or the car called breakup speeding up, or not doing something you enjoy likened to chewing gum that has lost flavour.

At times it felt like a teenager had written this book.

There were also a lot of characters that I forgot sometimes who they were - a character list would be nice to refer to, especially as the book is quite long and there can be a lot of pages before we meet that character again.

There were Korean words dotted around the story, it would have been useful if there were short explanations of the words through a footnote or at the end of the book.

More than halfway through the book, the author started to shift focus from Jungmin to the other characters which felt very random and out of place. Giving them whole chapters vs the first part where it was centred on Jungmin.

It also felt like the book should definitely be over by this point, the plot not having a structure and I I felt like I was reading and reading and only slowly getting through it. It could definitely be shorter than 300+ pages.

Overall, it is a book that has a lot of potential but quite a lot of editing needs to be done for it to retain its charm and engagement.

There’s an anime I love called Let’s Make a Mug Too and in my head, this book was going to have the same vibes…it did not.

The ‘healing’ part of the title should have been my clue to the self help vibe of this, so this is very much a case of this book not being the right fit for me personally.

I felt the characters were flat and while I enjoyed the pottery elements, they weren’t enough to carry this book for me and I found myself not wanting to pick it back up.

Thank you to netgalley for accepting my request to read this ARC in exchange for an honest review.
This was the first book I've read focused around Korean culture and it was interesting to learn about it.
I found the story cosy and heart warming, a reminder that it's ok to take time and focus on you, and it's never too late to start something new. I felt the topics of burnout, depression and loneliness were handled sensitively and carefully.
I would have preferred the story to continue around Jungmins life rather than exploring other characters, but that's just my preference.
I think this was a lovely, cosy read with a peaceful feel to it. I've never had a go at pottery or ceramics of any kind, but I'm very tempted to sign up to a class after reading this.