This novel is the second that I have read in English by famed Korean author Yon Jeong Jeong. She rose to fame after the release of her novel: The Good Son, which I really enjoyed. Naturally, I would pick up her second English translated novel titled, Seven Years of Darkness. A film adaption was released in 2018.
A man tries to find out the answers to the mysteries leading up to his father being accused of the murder of a young girl in a small dam villages years before.....
I'm going to get right into the meat of the matter and say that I didn't enjoy this novel nearly as much as I did The Good Son. One aspect of this novel is it's a family drama that spends most of it's pages describing the family dynamic of the people involved. I won't give away who did the killing but, it doesn't take a genius to figure out. Then to top everything off, the characters are multilayered causing them to need a deep look into their backgrounds to fully understand them. Keep in mind that this novel isn't very long and by the time you get untangled from all the connections the characters share with the victim, you're just wanting the story to come to a close. These same Korean story elements of family values mixed into dark mindsets that turn to beating their wife or self harm have been done before. Mostly because I feel many Koreans can't take this element of over analyzing family out of their stories due to their cultural values. Sometimes always trying to bring the essence of family into a tale that didn't need it to be great wouldn't have had some readers strolling off the beaten path to get to the main point of the novel which is the darkness in people's hearts. I believe that the relationship between father and son was written well in the text that hit a home run into my heart however, I wasn't a fan of any of the other relationships in this novel at all. At least the build up to the end wasn't bad. Everything just didn't seem to blend together as well as things did in The Good Son in my opinion. Probably because this was Jeong's earlier novel before The Good Son.
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