BJ's Reviews > Winter in Sokcho

There isn't much flesh on these bones, but Winter in Sokcho adds up to more than the sum of its parts. The imagery of snow and ice and raw seafood mesmerized me. The novel wears its themes with no subtlety whatsoever: plastic surgery and unraveling bandages, torn-up drawings of idealized women, body shaming, binge eating, male models, nude polaroids—in short, everything you'd expect of a novel about body image and self-destructive beauty standards. And yet somehow the book leaves the unshakeable impression that it is actually about something else entirely; that something impossible to place lurks behind the obvious symbolism of a divided country, a frozen war, a single mother and her mixed-race child, a woman effacing herself. The book refuses to be about freedom, or choice, or trauma; it insists on being, instead, about art, and fish soup, and winter, and desire.