Almond was a random find on my Kindle Unlimited. I'd never heard of the book or the author before but the description I head got to me... "This story is, in short, about a monster meeting another monster. One of those monsters is me."
How could I pass that up?
Now that I've finished reading, I can say it's something outside of what I would normally read. It is based in Korea, with Korean references, but there were no problems with that. It was perfectly translated and didn't have any references and uncultured American like myself couldn't understand. It was beautifully written, heartfelt and rich in details. The characters were deep and well rounded. They were imperfect and real in the best of ways.
The main character Yunjae was born with a brain condition called Alexithymia, which means that he doesn't feel or recognize emotions like 'normal' people do... even in the face of great tragedy. As always, I don't want to give away any major plot lines but it's the type of tragedy that would bring the strongest person to their knees.
His mother and grandmother spend their time raising him with love and acceptance but also, always trying to teach him proper reactions to those around him so that he can live normally and not be bullied or teased at school. They are the only real people in his life. His grandmother is where he gets the idea to call himself a monster. "“Maybe it’s because you’re special. People just can’t stand it when something is different, eigoo, my adorable little monster.” Granny hugged me so tight my ribs hurt. She always called me a monster. To her, that wasn’t a bad thing."
In the aftermath of the tragedy, Yunjae finds a whole new circle of people in his life. With them, he learns new things about himself and about the world. For the first time, he makes friends outside of his mother and grandmother. In their own ways, they try to teach Yunjae about feelings and people. They become in circle.
Some of my favorite parts of the book are how Yunjae describes the books in his mother's used book store.
Books that were already drenched in the scent of time. Not new ones that would regularly flow into the bookstores, but ones that Mom could handpick volume by volume. Hence, used books.
To be more specific, I felt connected to the smell of old books. The first time I smelled them, it was as if I’d encountered something I already knew.
Books took me to places I could never go otherwise. They shared the confessions of people I’d never met and lives I’d never witnessed. The emotions I could never feel, and the events I hadn’t experienced could all be found in those volumes.
But books were different. They had lots of blanks. Blanks between words and even between lines. I could squeeze myself in there and sit, or walk, or scribble down my thoughts. It didn’t matter if I had no idea what the words meant. Turning the pages was half the battle.
But books are quiet. They remain dead silent until somebody flips open a page. Only then do they spill out their stories, calmly and thoroughly, just enough at a time for me to handle.
They way he sees himself in books, even if he doesn't relate to the emotions he reads in them is touching to me. Maybe because I've always found solace in books myself. They've always been a place of comfort. They have lots of blanks as he said... for me, spaces we fill in with our own experiences and interpretations. And maybe that's why they were special to Yunjae as well, because they held no expectations for him, they didn't care that he wasn't 'normal'.
Perhaps one of the most poignant ideas of the story was Yunjae saying that Noone can ever know whether a story is happy or tragic. He says it might be impossible to fit so neatly into one category or the other because "life takes on various flavors as it flows." It reminded me of something I'd read before that stated that people are not all good or all bad, and that sometimes the perception comes again from our own experiences. You can be a good person who had done bad things. A life can be happy even with moments of tragedy.
This is absolutely a book I would recommend.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1/2