Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I loved this book and stayed up late into the night to finish it. I've read a number of books that take place in Korea or are authored by Koreans and/or Korean Americans, but this one covered a whole new facet of Korean life. Given the current popularity of K-Beauty products, it is fascinating to read about the role of beauty for contemporary Korean girls. the five young women whose stories are told are all seemingly outliers of society, but striving hard to find their own place. They are all interesting characters both on their own and as they relate to others. I did not want this book to end. Others have mentioned that the ending is a little abrupt, but it works for me, though I'd like to see the story continued, perhaps in a sequel.
The author uses a lot of Korean words and most of them are clear from context, but a glossary at the end would be a nice touch for readers who are dedicated to learning more about Korean life.

"Even as a girl, I knew the only chance I had was to change my face. When I looked into the mirror, I knew everything in it had to change, even before a fortune-teller told me so."
This is a beautiful character-driven story about five women in Korea where the unemployment rate and suicide rate are both very high. This is about the haves vs the have nots: those who have beauty, wealth, intelligence and family and those who do not. The women who don't have those things are treated differently in this story (and in life). Their relationships with each other and those around them are real and flawed. The concept reminded me a lot of A Woman is No Man by Etaf Rum which is another beautiful and sad story. I will be recommending this book to my book club!

Thanks to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine for allowing me to read and review an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. #IfIHadYourFace #NetGalley

While set in contemporary Seoul, If I Had Your Face also functions on a universal level as a tale of female friendship. Four friends in South Korea juggle their work, ambitions, and societal expectations. The beauty industry plays a key role in this book, as the four friends all experience different challenges and anxieties in terms of how they view their physical appearance and how the world views them.

Many thanks to NetGalley, the author, and the publisher for providing me with a copy of the book in exchange for an unbiased review.

I loved this book. The characters in Frances Cha’s book, If I Had Your Face, we’re so real and authentic to me. I had heard of this compulsion in Seoul of women having a lot of plastic surgeries and this story makes it all so real. I fell in love with these young woman, especially Kyuri. Ms. Cha has written an elegant and gripping story. Thanks to NetGalley and Random House Publishing. This is one terrific and quick read!

Such a gorgeous story! Don't look for a serious plot - it's not here. Looking for beautiful characters that interact and weave through each other's lives - then read this. An interesting read delving into the details of four female characters living in a culture so incredibly different from my own. Sexism, misogyny, social norms, gender roles are prevalent throughout the story and are heartbreaking and eye-opening. But in the end I took away the message of women supporting women. Although in this story that support could be a bit tragic, as these women were trying to support each other in a society that is so flawed against them. I believe this is a debut for this author and I say well done!! A great many thanks to NetGalley and Ballantine Books for providing me with an advanced copy.

"If I Had Your Face" is a surreal tale of competition, love, family, and survival in Korea. Bouncing off of the reality of plastic surgery in East Asia, "If I Had Your Face" follows hostesses in cruel competition with one another. A must-read for anyone interested in the other world on the other side of the world.

The first thing that caught my eye was the easy treatment of sex as commodity in this novel. I had to adjust my sensibilities and after that it was a curious story of self worth and how young people come under the influence of trying to perfection as a society perceives a beautiful person. These you g women are constantly discussing where to get cosmetic work done and how their lives are dictated by acquiring the look of perfection ,which in turn will result in a change in their lives for the better. I found this a sad take on life. One character goes home to find a change or a bit of peace, only to have her elders comment on her every move. It took to the end of the story for her to see the light .

I received this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I really have mixed feelings about this book. I have to say that it kept my attention, and I definitely wanted to keep returning to it after I put it down each night. The stories of the various women made me curious about them, and I found myself really wanting to know what happened in their lives.

However, I'm not sure I'm walking away from this book feeling any sort of emotional attachment to it. I liked the characters, but I didn't feel drawn in by any of them. They were interesting women who seem to have complex lives, but the stories of those complex lives didn't make me feel all that connected to them.

Overall, this was an interesting, entertaining book with a few moments of insight for me, but I am walking away feeling slightly unaffected, so that's why I'm giving it three stars.

If I Had Your Face is a searing debut that follows five young women living in the fringes of South Korean society, each struggling to make a living for themselves. Few books that claim to tackle misogyny are as successfully unrelenting as this one is; it's a bleak read, but also a beautiful one. This seems to be pitched as a book about the Korean beauty industry, which it is and it isn't; plastic surgery and makeup mostly litter the background of a couple of the narratives, as Cha focuses instead on the women who are actively harmed by cruel and unrealistic beauty standards.

This book's main asset has to be the characters: it's also been a while since I've read anything with characters this convincing. Of the five protagonists, four of them alternate first person point-of-view chapters, and each of their voices is so distinctive I never had trouble remembering whose head I was inhabiting, which tends to be a common pitfall of similarly structured fiction.

Narratively, this falls a bit short; it wraps up rather quickly and at the point where it ends, you feel like it could keep going for at least another 150 pages. One of the characters' arcs felt unfinished to me. And a few of the book's key events feel rushed, even before the end. But despite that, my impression of this book is largely favorable. I don't think I'll forget this in a hurry, and I can't wait for whatever Frances Cha does next.

Dysfunctional, self-destructive young women in nightmarish underbelly of Korean society.

A few typos here and there.

Thanks to the publisher for the ARC and all the best to the author in future work.

This is an original and dazzling debut, centering around four women living in the same apartment building in contemporary Seoul, Korea. These women navigate a beauty-obsessed, patriarchal society that attaches their value to their appearance.

Kyuri is a beautiful salon girl who caters to wealthy men in an exclusive salon room. Miho is a talented artist harboring a secret obsession with her best friend. Ara is a mute hairstylist whose obsession with a boy band member distracts her from her reality. Wonna is a pregnant newlywed who is dealing with multiple miscarriages and unresolved childhood trauma.

The characters are well developed and their struggles are relatable. The story is compulsively readable and though some character arcs are more satisfying than others, it remains a compelling read throughout.

The ending feels a bit abrupt and many questions are left unanswered. The narrative feels a bit disjointed at times as storylines don’t intersect often. This book effectively deals with themes of body image, cultural norms, beauty standards, and the role of women in society.

Thank you to Net Galley and Ballantine Books for providing me with this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you to NetGalley and Ballantine Books for giving me an ARC in exchange for an honest review!

If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha is a brutally honest look at contemporary life in Seoul, South Korea from the perspective of four young women who come from unfortunate backgrounds. It’s a sharp, unfiltered, smart, and unforgiving social critique and analysis that doesn’t pretend that everything will be better in the end. I also love that it calls out a problematic aspect of Korean culture. I know that it can get a little stifling there when it comes to addressing certain social issues so this is cool to read.

Kyuri is a beautiful salon girl who believed that if she changed her face to be more beautiful, then her fortune would change. Her job is to entertain wealthy men and other businessmen in a fiercely competitive environment that relies solely on being the most beautiful woman. Kyuri finds herself falling for one of her clients named Bruce despite seeing the “other side” of men who appear well-rounded because of their high social status.

Miho grew up in an orphanage and she is an artist in a doomed relationship with a wealthy young man named Hanbin. Miho essentially won her freedom by receiving a scholarship to a nice art school in New York City where she was taken in by other rich Koreans. Miho thinks she’s above the current craze of cosmetic surgery and the beauty-stricken expectations for women only to realize social status and beauty have more of an impact on her relationship than she wants.

Ara is a hairstylist and daughter of servants from a small town. An accident during her childhood has left her mute. She lives in Seoul and has an unhealthy fixation on a Kpop idol named Taein who she will do anything to meet. Ara also has a best friend named Sujin who has been saving up money for a major appearance altering cosmetic surgery which is becoming the norm for young people.

Finally, Wonna is married and attempting to have a child. Korea’s marriage and birth rate is hitting record lows and the cause is felt in Wonna’s chapters because of the unstable financial future so many young people face.

Each of the four women show that there is no Cinderella ending in life but the important thing is to be able to keep going. Each character is in a doomed relationship in a way and through them we see the effects of materialism, social structures, and harsh beauty standards. This is largely a character driven novel and the most basic plot summary is that it’s about four women in contemporary Korea. Beyond that, the flow of the book is largely up to them.

For me, this is a page turner. It’s interesting and fresh while being honest. It doesn’t sell a dream, it’s just sharing stories which I enjoy. This is an enjoyable read for those with multicultural interests. I am a big Kpop and KDrama fan myself so learning about Korea through art, entertainment, history, and literature is a must.

While I enjoyed it a lot, I can see where people will have issues with it. For me the main issue is that Kyuri, Ara, and Miho flowed together well. Ara and Miho are childhood friends along with another character named Sujin. Wonna lives in their same apartment building but for a larger portion of the novel, her story is separate from the other characters. It felt a little unfinished in that area.

The end will either go over well or it won’t for some people. For me, it was fine because they’re young and life goes on—they will continue to live and struggle. For people who want a more definitive ending then they will probably be disappointed by the lack of!

This book is unlike anything I've read this year. It is very interesting to read about the lives of Korean women, rather than American women. I will recommend this book to every woman I meet.

This book did not capture my interest. I feel it is unfair to give a review because the subject matter is not my choice of favorite reading.

I don't know anything about Korean culture. In this novel , it is depicted that the majority of straight woman comply willingly to the pervasive cultural idea of misogeny, body dysmorphical, strict rules around childbirth, and the forces at play that keep them down. I had a hard time immersing myself in the stories of any of the 4 main characters. One was grappeling with saving a baby and her marriage; one obessed with reconstructing her face, and all of them hinging on every word or gesture from a man she wishes saw her as beautiful. These 4 women live in the same apartment building, and their lives intersect now and again. None of the stories is as fleshed out as I would have liked and I never got a full understand of any of the main characters.

Interesting, in that the stifling nature of Korea's norms make ours downright revolutionary. But as a novel, did not hold my interest.

I really enjoyed reading this and found myself picking it up at all hours of the day. The ending was a little abrupt and underwhelming, but the appeal here is less the plot (of which there is little) and more the five women that we follow as they navigate the lower rungs of Korean society and try to claw out a space for themselves in a world of unrelenting misogyny. Some of the women’s arcs are more satisfying than others, and if anything this book left me wanting more of these characters, each of whom could command an entire novel to herself.

If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha is a great concept! I really enjoyed the plot, very different than most books.

This novel is an immersive dive into the fierce anxieties and hopes of young women in an unforgiving world where beauty is currency and success depends on your facial symmetry and who you know.

The novel takes place in Korea, mostly in trendy neighborhoods of Seoul, but also into the small backwoods town where a few of the girls grew up. At issue is a suffocating patriarchy that simultaneously punishes women for becoming mothers, but also bemoans the dropping birthrate.

Kyuri (my favorite of the girls) has a coveted and high profile job working in a room salon, offering party companionship to wealthy men in the evenings. It was unclear to me if all the women in room salons were prostitutes or not; Kyuri certainly is. Extraordinarily beautiful due to the multiple plastic surgeries that have put her in significant debt, she is living the good life, but is very aware that she has a shelf life.

Ara, her neighbor, is mute as a result of a brutal attack suffered when she was young. Being not as pretty as the other girls, she finds work as a hair dresser. Her thoughts are consumed with Taein, a k-pop star.

Miho, Kyuri's roommate, is a naturally beautiful artist whose thoughts are generally somewhere else. Although she began life as a penniless orphan, her artistic talents have found her swept into the world of the wealthiest Korean young people, such as her extravagantly wealthy boyfriend, whose devotion puzzles the other girls.

Wonna, a chronically unhappy married woman who also lives in the building, is an interesting study in contrasts. Pregnant and consumed with anxiety, she longs for belonging and love, but a childhood of abuse has taught her only to lash out.

I felt a sisterly kinship to these young women as they struggled in their relationships and careers, cheering with them in their successes and experiencing their righteous indignation when wronged. It tells a tale of sisterhood that transcends culture and will resonate with women the world over, and is recommended for anyone looking for a good, dark study of humanity.

I love reading books about women in other countries than in the US. I feel like it's a "value-added" perk of the book. Women are women everywhere but their individual stories vary and are really influenced by their environment. This is one such story.

It takes you into the world of extreme looks and appearance focus in South Korea. We all know they have the best beauty products and now we know why--the pressure on women to be beautiful is quite high. The amount of plastic surgery and debt incurred is staggering. This is a very character-driven book and the plot is slight but I felt like I got to know a very specific culture very well.

I didn't have strong impressions going into this, and I got so much more than I could've dreamed. I mostly picked it up because I love books by women about women, and if said book happens to take place somewhere I've never been, all the better. I'd already read mixed reviews on it, and all I really knew was it was about four Korean women existing in beauty-obsessed Seoul (that, and that the cover was, somewhat ironically, too gorgeous to ignore). Sign me up! Having finished it, I have to say that I'm not sure if it is just my eternal soft spot for books about women from the voices of women, but I enjoyed this so, so much. I will say that this is a book that anyone can enjoy and everyone should attempt, but it's going to resonate more strongly with women.

I've always been fascinated by beauty fads and trends in Korea, but I never imagined how deep that rabbit hole goes. I never noticed the weird undercurrent of competition when I'd read articles or skim current trends, though it makes sense. These things are universal on some levels—society against femininity, women against women, the woman resigned only to the roles of wife or mother, the judgment of the beautiful, the judgment of the unbeautiful (I recognize this isn't a word, but it is more effective than "ugly" simply because even average or even pretty women who don't fit the mold are never going to be considered beautiful, and the pressure to meet a standard that is ultimately just impossible to meet. In regards to the insane standards resting on the shoulders of these women, I found a sense of recognition, even if not in exactly the same vibe. I got the strong impression that the Korean standard is different, a league all its own, and the lengths these women have to go to in order to accomplish their goals is both impressive and upsetting. The leagues you have to go to meet their society's standards are extreme, and simply impossible. There is no amount of cosmetic surgery, after a certain point, to consistently keep your face trendy. Trends are always changing, and the surgeries only get more and more extreme. Beyond that, it's just exhausting to read the ways these women struggle to navigate their roles. These pages are steeped in sacrifice, some more subtle than others.

There's so much pressure on all of them, pressure to get married, and marry well, to navigate family, to move up, to have children, to raise children to be better than them, to be successful, whatever that means, and above all: to be beautiful. And everything has room for improvement. There's a lot of emphasis on roles and place within a society where if you weren't lucky enough to be born male, you had better be beautiful, rich, or well-married. Their anxieties are all valid and understandable, very real issues that plague us—working however you can to pay off a debt, bringing children into the world and all the fears that come with that, juggling relationships, surviving in a world designed to operate against them at every turn.

Cha's writing is very straightforward. It isn't really flowery or purple, and she doesn't dwell long on details. The pace is perfect, and I absolutely devoured this book. I was on a sort-of vacation that involved a lot of walking and moving, and yet I was in my hotel, completely exhausted, still burning the midnight oil to finish it. It's four distinct first-person perspectives—those of Kyuri, Wonna, Ara, and Miho—which might bother some people as I know not everyone is fond of first-person, but Cha uses it well in this. It has an epistolary vibe, but I liked that. Each character is very personable. You never question who's who when you're reading. I imagine people will have characters they prefer, whose chapters they'll look forward to more, but once I started it was difficult to put down no matter who was speaking. This is doubly impressive when you consider that it isn't super heavily plot-driven. Sure, each individual character has her own business she's sorting through, but know going into it that you're essentially reading this for the characters. This is not a bad thing. In fact, I'm impressed by how absorbing this is for a character-driven narrative since I tend to take those more slowly.

It's a strong, female-driven narrative with a solid ending. Granted, it wasn't an easy, everything-is-wrapped-up happily ever after sort of ending. You know all four women still have a long way to go, but it was appropriate for the story. Somewhat open, but nothing is left unsaid. A solid 4.5 stars, and I'm still trying to decide if I want to go ahead and bump that up to 5 stars. If you're on the fence about this one, you should absolutely give it a chance.

Thank you so very muchly to NetGalley, Ballantine Books, and Frances Cha for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.