The Magical Language of Others

The Magical Language of Others by E.J. Koh

I did really like this one. Koh's voice is fresh and unique. The presentation in this book is beautiful. The cover is gorgeous and inside between chapters Koh includes hand-written letters from her mother that really make this book feel personal.

This book is a story about generational pain, and how that can flow through family lines in ways we don't fully understand until sometimes it's too late to change it, or we can just hope for better the next generation. The stories told are of Koh, her mother and her grandmother, and how their lives fed into one another, both as sources of power and strength as well as conduits for that generational trauma. It's an insightful book, and because the author is writing about her own experience and her own family, the depictions feel very poignant.

The only difficulty I had reading it is that the book doesn't work through Koh's life in a linear fashion. It does sort of make it's way forward as she grows, but there were a few definite jumps back and forth that made it hard to understand the impact an event may have had, because I was picturing the wrong age until it actually said how old she actually was. Or I was visualizing an event right after her parents had left for South Korea, or sometimes long after, when in reality it was the other way around. I think this happens because the idea is to use her mother's letters as the impetus for the storytelling, and so she would pick an event that seemed to relate to the letter she introduces before the chapter. But it just felt a little disjointed. Maybe it's attempting to be an accurate representation of how disjointed she actually felt during this time of her life, but that didn't come through for me. That said, the jumps into the past of her family, like looks at her grandmother's and mother's life when they were children were well-timed, and because it's a different character didn't feel as confusing as being pulled around Koh's own life timeline.

All said though, that really is a fairly minor complaint in the scope of what this story is doing. The little vignettes are evocative and well written, the book is authentically voiced both by Koh and her mother's letters, and the couple days I spent reading it, this book filled my head. I would recommend those interested in these kind of stories give it a try, and see if your experience reading it is different than mine.