Minbak is a tender, quietly devastating novel about three generations of women shaped by love, grief, migration, and unspoken family pain. Ela Lee writes each character with so much compassion, exploring motherhood, identity, belonging, and generational trauma without ever reducing anyone to their mistakes.

Beautifully written and deeply moving, this is a story that will stay with me.

Thank you to St. Martin’s Press and NetGalley for the advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

An absolutely gut wrenching, yet beautiful read, about three generations of Korean women and the various sacrifices they make to keep themselves and their families together. The author sheds insight on what it means to be a woman in a deeply patriarchal society (especially with the added lenses of race/war), and consequently, how women keep secrets to maintain social and familial order.

This book emphasizes all the pressures that fall upon women to be the ones to keep things hidden, and to also be the ones to keep things moving, despite this invisible grief they must carry, often alone. The way subjects like generational trauma, mental health, misogyny, etc. are discussed is both profound, yet subtle, emphasizing how engrained these themes are that they don’t even need to be highlighted to be understood.

I was shocked to learn that the author is so young (born in 1995!!!!!) because this is genuinely one of the most well-written books I have ever read in my life. There are so many sentences that are entire poems on their own.

I am also so appreciative of when authors provide historical context to their writing. I learned a lot about the way Korean society functioned throughout the various decades, but also so much about the horrific adoption network. The novelist did a fantastic job at describing it in a nuanced way, without it being so evident that that was a huge focus of her book, which I find to be so impressive because it’s difficult to organically flow such serious topics into a piece of fiction.

Finally, I am always so grateful for when a book allows me to reflect on my own interpersonal relationships. This made me think of my own relationship with my immigrant mother, and perhaps the stories from my grandmother that I never got to learn about. We really are the first in our bloodline to do xyz.