Series: Standalone
Release Date: April 21, 2020
“Even as a girl, I knew the only chance I had was to change my face… even before a fortune-teller told me so.”
Kyuri is a heartbreakingly beautiful woman with a hard-won job at a “room salon,” an exclusive bar where she entertains businessmen while they drink. Though she prides herself on her cold, clear-eyed approach to life, an impulsive mistake with a client may come to threaten her livelihood.
Her roommate, Miho, is a talented artist who grew up in an orphanage but won a scholarship to study art in New York. Returning to Korea after college, she finds herself in a precarious relationship with the super-wealthy heir to one of Korea’s biggest companies.
Down the hall in their apartment building lives Ara, a hairstylist for whom two preoccupations sustain her: an obsession with a boy-band pop star and a best friend who is saving up for the extreme plastic surgery that is commonplace.
And Wonna, one floor below, is a newlywed trying to get pregnant with a child that she and her husband have no idea how they can afford to raise and educate in the cutthroat economy.
Together, their stories tell a gripping tale that’s seemingly unfamiliar, yet unmistakably universal in the way that their tentative friendships may have to be their saving grace.
• Physical assault (on-page and off-page, one instance resulting in one main character, Ara becoming mute)
• Emotional abuse
• Discussion of abortion
• Discussion of miscarriage
• Cheating
• Discussion of suicide and suicidal ideation
• Discussion of murder and suicide of sex workers
• Does have cheating
• No OM
• Does have OW
— He cheats on her with a sex worker (a friend of Miho’s roommate) and is engaged to a woman from a family of similar economic wealth to him
• Does have Miho pushing Hanbin away
• No separation
Wonna’s relationship with her husband: Safe with Exception
• No cheating
• No OW/OM drama
• Does have Wonna pushing her husband away
• Does have a separation between Wonna and her husband (a permanent one, I think)
• See Ending for HEA status.
• See Possible Triggers for Abuse and OTT sad parts.
Format: Hardcover
Rating: 3.5/5 stars
If I Had Your Face is the story of four women interconnected through a shared office-tel–an apartment building. Miho, an artist mourning her dead best friend, lives with a sex worker and waiter at an exclusive Seoul “room salon,” Kyuri, who has transformed her face through multiple surgeries to get the job that only accepts the most beautiful of women. Ara is a childhood friend of Miho’s and a hairdresser who is obsessed with the K-pop star, Taein and whose best friend, and roommate, wants to work in a “room salon.” Finally, rounding out the perspectives is the newly married Wonna, who attempts to balance her desire for a life free from her traumatic childhood with the lack of respect she feels for her husband.
Character-Driven Plot
In the past few months, most of my reviews have been on character-driven books, and If I Had Your Face is no exception. I would even argue that the entirety of If I Had Your Face‘s plot is focused on the main characters’ slow growth.
Each of the women has personal blinders or fantasies that drive them onward and give them hope in a society stacked to favour those who come from the right family, neighbourhood, college, and who are seen as beautiful. However, as each of their stories unfolds, it becomes obvious that the women were living in denial rather than fantasy, which could lead to heartbreak if not acknowledged.
Kyuri spends most of the book talking about how smart she is looking at her work shrewdly. She laments, many times, that it’s dumb for girls to get their hopes up that a client will lift them out of their current reality: being subjugated to the whims of madams and pimps. However, Kyuri ends up making that blunder by thinking a wealthy client would get her out of her life.
Wonna gets through her marriage to a husband she does not respect by fantasizing about a perfect relationship with a daughter (a son would eventually replace the mother with a wife). However, after her pregnancy makes it past the three-month mark, she’s faced with the harsh monetary reality of raising a child and the shaky grounds of her marriage.
Ava takes comfort in fantasies of her favourite K-Pop artist, Taein, from the harsh treatment of being mute. However, as Ava eventually learns, the reality of celebrities is much different than their cultivated image.
Finally, Miho takes refuge from the suicide of her best friend in the USA in her boyfriend–who used to be her best friend’s boyfriend. Only to discover that her boyfriend is not an anomaly to the stereotypes of wealthy and handsome men in Seoul.
Pacing Slowed by Disillusionment
As you can understand, reading about how every success and happy moment eventually got unwound in the middle of the novel made me very reluctant to pick up If I Had Your Face after putting it down.
One of the most important parts of a book is its pacing: does it hold the reader’s attention, is it unputdownable, and do I want to pick it up after stopping? While I was reluctant to pick the book up again, I read half of it before putting the book down once I started the book. Therefore, taking my time with the book was more a reflection on its content than its pacing.
If I Had Your Face was so well written, but it was also demoralizing. It was too “real-world suffering” for my current reading mood. I’ve become much more anxious during the past few months, and reading about these women suffering due to sexism and classism was infuriating and made me feel hopeless.
Yet, getting over the hump of disillusionment in the middle led to many testaments to these women’s resilience and their important connections that saw them through their life-altering changes.
Unique Perspectives
There are many allusions around If I Had Your Face–including in the synopsis–about the friendship between the women who share their office-tel in Seoul. However, the connections between the women and their resulting tentative friendships were incredibly subtle. The best friendship was definitely between Ara and her roommate (and best friend since childhood), Sujin (whose perspective we do not get). Sujin was an amazing friend to Ara as well as Miho and Kyuri.
I particularly liked how the POVs weren’t the ones you’d traditionally expect to be included; for example, Sujin plays an important role in the lives of both Ara and Kyrui, yet she is only a supporting character. Instead, the perspective of Wonna as a new wife provides a demonstration of what a woman’s life in Seoul is like after she is married–the societal expectation of young women.
In Conclusion
The descriptions of South Korea as a setting and culture were phenomenal. The author, Frances Cha, revealed a whole culture I was unaware of. Cha also raised some crucial points about the reality of sex workers: how it is the workers who get vilified in society instead of the clients; the news never mentions the women who get killed or who commit suicide due to the nature of their work. There’s a lack of humanizing whenever sex work gets brought up in mainstream society.
Despite my appreciation that the book found a way to bring all the main characters together, I think that there was a bit too much breadth to the novel. A significant portion of If I Had Your Face is dedicated to constructing each main character–the past events that have led to why they think and behave the way they do in the present. As a reader who loves character-driven novels, I really enjoyed these perspectives in the past. However, because of the number of perspectives and the chapters’ lengths, most of the book was then dedicated to all these traumatic events and their demoralizing realities.
However, for how reluctant I was to start reading If I Had Your Face again due to the disillusionments, the ending is surprisingly hopeful. There is a suggestion of a burgeoning friendship between all the women, and each of the main characters is finally living their truth, even if it’s against the grain of society.
In all, I did enjoy If I Had Your Face but given my mood while reading and the lack of depth in its plot, the novel is strictly a 3.5-star read.
Buy If I Had Your Face
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