What a cute slice of life. I will say it started off slow but the characters were interesting from the beginning. I loved the middle with the cute love story about "fairy" but then it started to drag again. I still enjoyed it as a whole and found it to be a quick read which are always fun to make time for.

Yeonam-dong Smiley Laundromat is a heartwarming and deeply touching story that beautifully weaves together the lives of its characters, showing how they're all interconnected in meaningful ways. The author masterfully creates an 'everything happens for a reason' atmosphere, making each character's journey feel profoundly relatable and uplifting. This book is a poignant reminder that we are never as alone as we think, and it left me feeling comforted and inspired. I'm filled with admiration for the author’s talent and can't wait to see more of their work in the future!

I found Yeonnam-Dong’s Smiley Laundromat to be a cozy yet generic read. I liked the concept of the journal, but wished there was more plot development in the actual laundromat. Throughout the story, there are heartfelt moments, but also very cringy ones. Overall, the book wasn’t bad, just nothing new or exciting. I also have mixed feelings about the audiobook narrator. He read the narrative completely fine, but some of the character voices were questionable and took me out of the story. 2.5 stars. Thanks NetGalley and publishers for this audio ARC!

A very cute, healing fiction. It’s similar to other translated healing fiction books. You get to meet multiple characters and see how they all mix together.

So this is strictly a review of the audiobook version, and not a reflection of the story itself . I was excited to read this because the premise sounded like the perfect kind of wholesome Kdrama to start the year with, and I have enjoyed previous works by this translator. However, the narrator's choice to use exaggerated accents for all characters, as if they're speaking to each other in English (they're not, they're IN KOREA, speaking jn Korean) was deeply jarring and borderline incomprehensible. That paired with the fact that the non-accented non-dialogue narration was entirely flat with no emotive or storytelling quality made it extremely painful for me to finish the audiobook. It's such a shame, especially for a debut author, because I'm sure the actual content is probably quite good. Perhaps I will seek out a print/ebook version in the future. I really hope this terrible audiobook narration does not detract from the English translation's success. The idea of telling stories about average Koreans and their daily struggles, living at the edge of a glamorously gentrified Seoul district, would otherwise be a wonderful contemporary urban Asian narrative.