DREAMT I FOUND YOU
JIMIN HAN
Little Brown and Company (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now
Rating: 4* of five
The Publisher Says: From the critically acclaimed author of The Apology, a contemporary retelling of Korea’s Romeo & Juliet, in which the cousin of the star-crossed lovers helps them avoid a tragic fate.
When Dahee Shin was nine years old, she made a promise to protect her favorite cousin, Channing, who has always been like a sister to her. Now, at thirty, Dahee has found herself in a Korean American community in a New England beach town, once more running to the rescue of her debt-ridden relative.
Ever the idealist, Channing—who has spent her life haunted by the tragic story of Chunhyang and Mongryong, Korea’s parallel Romeo & Juliet—has fallen in love with Minjae Oh, all the while fending off the advances of powerful, manipulative Kent Cho, a local politician. As Channing and Minjae’s romance blossoms, and as Kent's suspicion and obsession grow, Dahee begins to realize that it may be up to her to make sure her cousin and beloved escape Chunhyang and Mongryong’s doomed end.
For fans of Hello Beautiful, Dreamt I Found You is a wondrous, tender retelling of Korea's most classic love story, steeped in the travails of a rigid class system, the power of premonition, and shot through with Korean folklore and magic.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: A double shot of romantic emotional caffeine. The story of Chunhyang and Mongryong, then the modern-day Korean diaspora story that evokes it, all juxtaposed with subtlety against the bog-standard Murrikin's understanding of Romeo & Juliet and set on the New England coast.
All of this is just fine, sure I'll read it no problem; what made me want to tell y'all about it, is that I saw more parallels to Shakespeare in Love than to Romeo & Juliet. I myownself found that *more* appealing not less so. I know I'll get body-checked into the glass (I need to stop reheating Heated Rivalry) for saying this, but stop telling me I must love Shakespeare's foreign-language drama with its now-stock characters for the depth of his insight. That depth has been added over the course of almost half a millennium of studying analyzing and commenting on the source text! We "know" it's there because so so many people have already "found" it and told us about it. It's now cultural shorthand in Anglophone cultures (possibly others but I have no direct access to those). "It's the Korean Romeo & Juliet" is not an analysis, it's an emotional appeal to the Anglophone reader's cultural furniture.
Author Han has very cannily gotten us Anglophones to do the hard work of buying in to her story in one fell swoop with this (apt, it seems to me) evocation of the very slightly older (c. 1591 versus c. 1694) iteration of the eternal star-crossed lovers story. I was primed by the clearly stated link between this modern-day version and its historical antecedents. I got the expected frisson from the love-conquers-all story, spiced up by the deeply satisfying comeuppance of a crappy human being. Beats there a heart so cold as to not race just a little when the lovers defeat a rotten, jealous monster?
I think not, at least not outside the ranks of the aromantic.
It's the beating heart of the story told here, that tension between what we're expecting, what we know, and what's happening on the page. While Minjae and Channing and Dahee and Kent do their literary gavotte with all its showy back-and-forths, its little hops and leg-pointings, and its apparently endless—at times feeling relentless—repetitions of the same movements to no internal resolution, the external story outline we've applied from long, long cultural familiarity serves as the musical accompaniment that grants us the readers as well as them the characters a stopping place.
I did say stopping place, not ending. The thing about a gavotte is that it's a folk dance all dressed up for aristocratic slumming, so it never develops beyond stylish-looking moves that show the dancers' stamina more than their grace. In Dreamt I Found You the characters are set a task...fall in love, overcome an obstacle, help or obstruct these actions...and repeat that task against a variations-on-a-theme backdrop. It's a time-tested technique that keeps on working because the specifics are fungible as a result of the audience's investment being all but assured. It requires little character development. All that is handled by the evocative models folloed, the stpes of the dance known to most all of us.
The "music" that provides the pace in Dreamt I Found You is the US culture on display. It must be said that culture is not shown to great advantage, but it also isn't deeply explored by the characters' interactions. They all execute the steps, do the hops, make the gestures; nothing derails their actions. The jolts and surprises are few because they're built into both model storys' bones and are well known to us. It doesn't really feel surprising, the biggest tension is will this be Shakespeare's tragedy or Korea's re/union?
Reading it to find out is the pleasure of discovery on offer. I resonated to the story, I liked the author's choice of which model to emulate, and at the end of the dance I bowed to my book-shaped partner and led him off the dance floor admiring how handsomely he had done the dance with me.
