Cover Image: If I Had Your Face

If I Had Your Face

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Member Reviews

This short novel explores the interconnecting lives of four women in modern day Seoul. Although all different, these women all share one thing in common - a fascination with beauty. The book explores themes such as westernised beauty standards ingrained in society, the perceived perception of what makes a woman beautiful, the superficial nature of what it is to seen as beautiful, as well as the misogyny that is exhibited through all aspects of daily life.

I really liked seeing the parallels between these women from different backgrounds. The novel is structured in such a way that we see more of a glimpse into their lives and daily activities rather than having a tight narrative plot, meaning we really get to examine what affects them on a daily basis. It delves deep into the characters rather than having any kind of overarching story and to really enjoy the novel you need to form some kind of bond with the characters. My personal favourite is Ara. A mute hairdresser, who's nicknamed 'the little mermaid' by her beauty obsessed friend, she loves K pop. Quiet but ruthless.

The prose in this is really lovely, with some wonderful and lyrical sentences, although at times I found the overall flow of the story to feel a little stilted. As I've said, this won't be for everyone due to the lack of plot but I still found it easy to connect to the characters and want to learn more about them. There's an undertone that runs throughout that screams of the gritty underworld and class system in South Korea that still oppresses women and femininity is confirmed to the will of men. It feels unjust and real and very relevant.

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‘If I Had Your Face’ provides a fascinating glimpse into South Korea’s culture of achieving perfection through plastic surgery, through the lives of 4 very different women who live in the same apartment building.
Frances Cha has a very economical, clean style of writing which I really appreciated and which really helped to make the strange and sometimes disturbing city in which the women live easier to digest. The ‘room salon’ in which Kyuri works feels totally bizarre and outdated to me as an English woman and yet Cha manages to help me understand why in this society such a role would be highly prized, even as she shows how sexist and fragile their world is.
There are four protagonists, all of whom narrate their chapters in the first person, and Cha manages skilfully to give each woman her own voice. As with any story with multiple threads, I sometimes found myself wishing I was still hearing events from another one of the characters but this did not detract from the story for me.
I was a little disappointed by the book’s final act, and not necessarily satisfied by every character’s conclusion (Miho’s in particular) but again, this didn’t colour my opinion of the book.
An intriguing and very promising debut. I eagerly await Cha’s next novel!
Thank you very much to Penguin and NetGalley for sending me an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

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I am so impressed with this debut novel. We follow a group of very different women who live in an Officetel in Gangnam as they try to live the “best version” of life open to them. It’s messy and sad, weird and funny and I loved every minute of it. The ending was a bit abrupt but it’s ok, I think there was probably no other way to end it. I mean I did not want to leave them either, so maybe the author did not know how to extract herself from them either. I will think about these women for a long time.

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This wasnt quite what I had thought it would be. As much as I loved the characters I never knew that plastic surgery was so popular in south Korea. Its sad to think that girls go through this but the story touched on some sad and eye opening parts of this world

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Is plastic surgery really such a big deal in South Korea? Sadly it is, as a few pages into this novel I started to look into things I hoped would not be true. South Korea is the plastic srugery capital of the world apparently. Make of that what you will. The three women in the novel do and there’s an air of sadness around all of them as they go to the best beauty places and ‘pretty factories’ to change their bodies into something they think and hope will validate them.

They should teach this in high school during this social media age. On a more serious note, you really start to understand the reasons behind why women here feel they need to look a certain way. There are social divides in every country but here there are chasms.
Fascinating but tragically sad when you think about it.

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If I Had Your Face is a slap in the face, in the best possible way.

This book follows four young women - Miho, an emerging artist who went to a New-York City art school through a scholarship and is now trying to adapt to her life back in Seoul; Ara, a mute hairdresser who is obsessed with a member of a kpop group; Kyuri, a salon girl whose body is her way of earning money and is therefore always trying to improve it; and Wonna, a married woman who married because it was expected of her and is now pregnant.

Those four characters depict a sad aspect of South Korea’s society - the importance of a woman’s image, why plastic surgery is so ordinary and almost expected of women, the social hierarchy and its importance and how it dictates your every decision and move in society, the place of a woman and what is expected of her no matter what (marry and procreate).

I know bits and pieces about South Korea’s misogynistic society but this was an eye-opener. If I Had Your Face is bold in its depiction of modern Seoul and doesn’t hold back from showing us the ugly truths about its society and internal mechanisms.

The writing is phenomenal and although the narrative is divided between our four MCs and alternates point of views, Cha managed to truly give her characters different voices and I never wondered whose point of view I was reading - they were all so distinctive! This definitely did not feel like a debut.

If I Had Your Face was a really good surprise that I would definitely recommend to everyone interested in South Korea or who enjoyed books such as The Vegetarian by Han Kang or Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo.

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If I Had Your Face follows four young women in contemporary Seoul: Kyuri, working in a room salon; Miho, who has won a scholarship to a New York art school; Wonna, haunted by memories of her abusive grandmother; and Ara, a mute hair stylist.

I know almost nothing about South Korea, and now I want to read more about the country. A place where plastic surgery is as common as wearing mascara, and working in a room salon is a sought after job, this is an absolutely fascinating read with wonderful characters. Would definitely recommend.

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What a look into a world and society I haven't experienced. The love, sisterhood and annoyances of the friends is clear and relatable, and the book carries you along at a swift clip.

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I received this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review – thanks so much to Netgalley for sending this to me!

On paper (no pun intended) If I Had Your Face sounds like a book that really shouldn’t work. It’s a slice-of-life type novel following four women – Ara, Kyuri, Miho and Wonna – and their every day struggles, largely due to the pressures of the South Korean beauty industry. Sex worker Kyuri is in horrendous debt thanks to her many surgeries; artist Miho is obsessed with her dead friend, who happens to be her current boyfriend’s ex; hairdresser Ara is a former gang-member who lost her voice in a fight and is infatuated with the most popular member of a K-Pop band, and Wonna is a lonely woman so terrified she’ll lose yet another baby that she refuses to acknowledge either her pregnancy or her long-suffering husband.

There’s very little plot to the novel, it truly is a slice of life in every sense of the word, and because of this it doesn’t follow the traditional structure one would expect. Each woman’s story gets its own climax, but none of them are particularly ground-breaking. Despite this, the novel works, and is surprisingly compelling. It was a pretty slow read, but the character work is so excellent that I barely noticed the lack of plot. The way the women interact with each other – they all live in the same building so their lives fairly regularly intersect – was fascinating, and I really enjoyed their different dynamics. I also loved the setting; I’m not familiar with South Korea but I found the setting to be vibrant and colourful, an amazing backdrop to this story.

If you like a plotty novel, then I’d recommend giving this one a miss, because like I said it’s not massively eventful. That being said, these women are all complex with rich backstories, which made this very enjoyable to read. The only character I didn’t really connect with was Wonna, largely because she had a lot less page time than the other women. She felt a little bit like a ghost on the very edge of the narrative, which could be intentional; she’s the oldest, arguably has the least glamorous life, and is pretty detached from others in general. Her strongest desire is to have a child in order to assuage her loneliness, but that desire never fully came through for me. I felt quite distanced from her. I think she contrasted very interestingly with my personal favourite character, Kyuri, a ‘room girl’ who was headstrong and opinionated and really leapt off the page.
Overall I had a great time reading this. It wasn’t what I expected, and I wasn’t sure it was going to click with me, but something about it just works. If you enjoy character driven narratives, then this one is well worth the read.

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Set in Seoul, If I Had Your Face follows four very different young women who live in the same building. Ara is a mute hairdresser who has an unexpected violent side, heightened by her obsession with a K-pop star. Kyuri is a former prostitute who, having transformed her looks with plastic surgery, makes lots of money at an exclusive 'room salon', but also has huge debts. Miho, outwardly the most successful of the characters – an artist who has returned to Korea after a scholarship in New York – is haunted by memories of her late friend Ruby, whose boyfriend she is now dating. Wonna is married and pregnant; she wants to be a mother, but is both terrified of losing the baby and convinced she can't really afford to bring up a child.

This is a South Korea in which women's roles are changing – marriage and birth rates are at an all-time low – while career options are still limited. Even those who would prefer to follow a more traditional path are hampered by financial constraints and lack of support (Wonna is told she can only take three months' maternity leave). Young women like our protagonists, all of whom come from disadvantaged backgrounds, often see physical beauty as a way out of poverty, and to that end they treat cosmetic surgery as a kind of investment. As the novel's title suggests, this obsession with beauty becomes a persistent, slightly exhausting theme.

My main problem with If I Had Your Face only became apparent once I'd finished it: some really odd things are glossed over so everyone can be given a vaguely upbeat ending. I'm thinking in particular of Ara, who savagely beats a girl who pisses her off at work – an incident that's barely mentioned after it occurs, and seems to have been forgotten by the end. Both Miho and Wonna have interesting storylines which aren't fully developed. Miho's story, especially, feels like it's building up to a payoff that never comes.

Altogether, I think this book is best enjoyed as something light and fluffy; it doesn't delve too deep into its characters' most troubling attributes, nor their most intriguing ones. That's not to say it's without literary merit, though, and I found Frances Cha's portrait of Seoul society enlightening as well as entertaining.

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I'm torn between giving this 2 or 3 stars.. This book was pretty much just ok. It was something to kill time really.

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A brilliant debut set in Seoul, South Korea, that tackles themes of beauty and social hierarchy. Led by a cast of perfectly flawed female characters, this book totally transported me.

Highly recommended!

Thanks to NetGalley and Penguin for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

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This was such a wonderful story of strong female characters. The crafting of their lives was so vivid that I really felt as if I was with them. The topics were so relevant and it was a pleasure to learn more about Korean culture. I enjoyed to Google the food they ordered and everything felt unbelievable authentic. The pressure to be beautiful is nowadays immense and the cultural critique was done well. Also marriage and getting kids was discussed and how difficult it is currently. This really resonated with me since I have the exact same fears as them.
This book also made me cry multiple times and how the women fought for themselves just really motivated me.
And please let this be a series since I want to read more...
A huuuuge recommendation for everyone into drama and Korea and interested in beauty surgery and critique on the society.
Go read this book! I am so happy I could read it as an ARC.

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The writing style is a little jarring - it takes a while to actually get into the novel, there's no world building or informational paragraphs, you're just sort of thrown into the deep end - it's subject matter is well researched. I couldn't really get into it, but I suspect it'll be a positive book for other people. The reviews already say enough.

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A fascinating insight into life for young women in South Korea. The obsession with perceived standards of beauty (and the lengths gone to, in order to emulate them) is pretty saddening. Frances Cha explores a variety of themes, both universal and culture centric, through the characters' friendships, backgrounds and daily lives. "If I Had Your Face" is a first class debut novel and a riveting read.

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The author uses a quartet of complex South Korean women to illustrate the lives of many ordinary women in the country. It's not a particularly easy read with almost casual violence and accepted misogyny, and the need to be a survivor contrasting with what sometimes feels like writing from a teenage magazine about beauty, make-up and Kpop.
A skilful, thoughtful debut novel, although I did find the ending quite abrupt.
Thank you to netgalley and penguin books for an advance copy of this book

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This book follows the lives of 4 young women in modern-day Seoul. It was fascinating and horrifying in equal measure. I have recently read Sarong Party Girls and thought I’d learnt about this culture, but this went much deeper and further.

I learnt so much that I didn’t know about K-Pop, plastic surgery and ‘room salons’, which I’d never even heard of.
Although on the surface the characters were unlikeable they all had a vulnerability to them, which made them sympathetic.

My only one negative would be that I felt that the book finished too suddenly – I felt that there could have been some more wrapping up in at least a couple of the stories. Otherwise – fantastic!

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If I Had Your Face is an incredible debut. It's a hard-hitting gritty look at a side of South Korean society that outsiders don't often get to see. That said, it's a book that will resonate with women across the world. A truly engaging read that will stay with you long after the final word.

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As somebody that grew up immersed in South Korean culture (K-pop, Korean dramas, the Hallyu wave, idol celebrities), I jumped at the chance to read and review If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha. Touted an electrifying read by fellow authors, in If I Had Your Face we follow four female protagonists, struggling to survive in South Korea. Each woman has a truly complex backstory and they’re all interlinked in very distant ways. Cha’s glittering writing style unfailingly takes you deep into the soul of every character, even as the POV switches from character to character, each chapter. I can’t believe this is her debut. Whether you’re similarly enmeshed in Korean culture as I am, or you simply quite enjoy BTS’ newest releases, this is a dark, somewhat unsettling and truly compelling read. I think I read it in five sittings and I think it’ll be one that resonates with many, staying with them for years for its comments on contemporary Seoul society.

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A fascinating dive into a gritty underbelly of a society where appearances are more important than healthy relationships. Through the lives of 4 young (even if society says they are not!) women you are told about the troubles they face trying to live a normal life in a misogynistic society, where money is king and beauty is everything. Having worked in South Korea myself as an English teacher, I've seen this side of South Korea that is not shown to the rest of the world. It is a world that goes beyond the polished beautiful facades of K-pop and K-drama stars and shows the struggle normal people have dealing with societies high standards.

From aiming to get the perfect face shape, finding the perfect husband, having children, to the drunken business men stumbling on the streets, Francesca Cha perfectly reveals the innermost imperfections of South Korean society in a brilliant read.

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