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The Good Son by You-Jeong Jeong
Jun. 10th, 2019 10:42 pmThe Blurb On The Back:
The smell of blood woke me. It was intense, as though my whole body was inhaling it. Strange scenes flitted through my mind – the fuzzy yellow light of a row of street lamps in the fog, swirling water below my feet, a crimson umbrella rolling along a rain-soaked road. I got out of bed. I needed to figure out what had happened.
Yu-jin is a perfect student, champion swimmer and good son. But one day he wakes up covered in blood. There’s no sign of a break-in and there’s a body downstairs. It’s the body of someone who Yu-jin knows all too well.
Yu-jin struggles to piece together the fragments of what he can remember from the night before. He suffers from regular seizures and blackouts. He knows he will be accused if he reports the body but what to do instead? Faced with an unthinkable choice, he makes an unthinkable decision.
As the police descend on the suburban South Korean district in which eh lives, another body is discovered, and Yu-jin must remember what happened – he has to go back, right back, to the night he lost his father and brother, and, eventually, further than that …
( The Review (Cut For Spoilers): )
The Verdict:
You-Jeong Jeong’s psychological thriller (translated from Korean by Chi-Young Kim) is a weirdly stilted, soap opera-style affair that’s more why-do-it than who-dunnit and filled with overdone emotions, motivations that stretched credibility and although there are some interesting moments as it seeks to get under the skin of a psychopath, ultimately I struggled to hold my attention on it until the end and wouldn’t rush to read Jeong’s other work.
Thanks to the Amazon Vine Programme for the review copy of this book.
Yu-jin is a perfect student, champion swimmer and good son. But one day he wakes up covered in blood. There’s no sign of a break-in and there’s a body downstairs. It’s the body of someone who Yu-jin knows all too well.
Yu-jin struggles to piece together the fragments of what he can remember from the night before. He suffers from regular seizures and blackouts. He knows he will be accused if he reports the body but what to do instead? Faced with an unthinkable choice, he makes an unthinkable decision.
As the police descend on the suburban South Korean district in which eh lives, another body is discovered, and Yu-jin must remember what happened – he has to go back, right back, to the night he lost his father and brother, and, eventually, further than that …
( The Review (Cut For Spoilers): ) The Verdict:
You-Jeong Jeong’s psychological thriller (translated from Korean by Chi-Young Kim) is a weirdly stilted, soap opera-style affair that’s more why-do-it than who-dunnit and filled with overdone emotions, motivations that stretched credibility and although there are some interesting moments as it seeks to get under the skin of a psychopath, ultimately I struggled to hold my attention on it until the end and wouldn’t rush to read Jeong’s other work.
Thanks to the Amazon Vine Programme for the review copy of this book.
