Lemon by Korean author Kwon Yeo-sun is a crime novel that explores aliveness and the impact of events on families.
Location: South Korea
Lemon synopsis
In the summer of 2002, nineteen-year-old Kim Hae-on was murdered in what became known as the High School Beauty Murder. There were two suspects: Shin Jeongjun, who had a rock-solid alibi, and Han Manu, to whom no evidence could be pinned. The case went cold.
Seventeen years pass without justice, and the grief and uncertainty take a cruel toll on her younger sister, Da-on, in particular. Unable to move on with her life, Da-on tries in her own twisted way to recover some of what she’s lost, ultimately setting out to find the truth of what happened.
Told at different points in time from the perspectives of Da-on and two of Hae-on’s classmates, Lemon is a piercing psychological portrait that takes the shape of a crime novel and is a must-read novel of 2021.
Book review
Lemon is not your run-of-the-mill crime novel. It is not about who did what, but about the meaning of each person’s life and what being alive means. There are many different forms of aliveness, although it may not seem that way to others. You have to infer from the testimonies what happened; all the narrators often think back to that one day and shed light on the events.
The voices of the narrators reflect their personalities and the situations they are in well. All those involved have had their lives changed by what happened and their family life has changed with it. They have taken a different path in life and lost what they were once very passionate about. How people deal with grief and pain is woven into the story as neatly as the color yellow. Plastic surgery, beauty ideals and privilege are important topics.
The first narrator’s thoughts in the opening chapter make you question everything that is said, turning everything over in your mind, looking for the hidden meanings, for the reason. She still knows more than we do at this point, although there are many hints given in each chapter and you probably know what happened early on.
I wonder if this novel should have been longer, or if the unmysterious implicitness of many things is precisely its strength. The story was complete, it was compelling and yet not on the scale of what perhaps a longer story could bring. This novel is sharp enough to impress, but not mesmerizing enough to wow. Lemon is a good novel, an enjoyable experience, but also one that will not leave a lasting impression in my memory.
Interested?
Get your copy of Lemon from Amazon (available 7 October 2021).
Book details
Title: Lemon
Author: Kwon Yeo-sun
Translator: Janet Hong
Language: English
Publisher: Head of Zeus
Pages: 160
ISBN (13): 9781800241473
Publication date: 7 October 2021
About the author and translator
Kwon Yeo-sun is an award-winning Korean writer. She has won the Sangsang Literary Award, Oh Yeongsu Literature Award, Yi Sang Literary Prize, Hankook Ilbo Literary Award, Tong-ni Literature Prize and Lee Hyo-seok Literary Award. Lemon is her first novel to be published in the English language.
Janet Hong is a writer and translator based in Vancouver, Canada. She received the TA First Translation Prize and the LTI Korea Translation Award for her translation of Han Yujoo’s The Impossible Fairy Tale, which was also a finalist for both the 2018 PEN Translation Prize and the National Translation Award. Her recent translations include Ha Seong-nan’s Bluebeard’s First Wife, Ancco’s Nineteen, and Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s Grass.
Many thanks to Head of Zeus and NetGalley for a digital ARC of this novel in exchange for an honest review.
