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A review by chamomiledaydreams
Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop by Hwang Bo-Reum
3.0
This is a very peaceful book, and I appreciate a lot of its themes/messages: that we should care more about happiness than success; that a good life is lived one step at a time, through a series of good days; and that hard work isn't worth the ensuing burnout.
However, I'm not too impressed by the audiobook edition. The narrator has a relaxing voice, and I enjoyed listening to her speak, as though it were background noise. But she doesn't distinguish between characters voices enough, in my opinion, which makes many conversations with sparse dialog tags difficult to follow.
This affected my overall impression of the book, because half the time, I wasn't quite certain who was speaking. The themes and overarching stories are great, and the characters do have unique personality traits. But at times, their words felt interchangeable, and I only felt moved by spoken passages when one person had a fairly big monologue, so I could absorb both the depth of their words and the relevance to their character arc.
I can understand why so many people love this book, but I suspect that I would have been more similarly moved if I hadn't listened to the audiobook.
However, I'm not too impressed by the audiobook edition. The narrator has a relaxing voice, and I enjoyed listening to her speak, as though it were background noise. But she doesn't distinguish between characters voices enough, in my opinion, which makes many conversations with sparse dialog tags difficult to follow.
This affected my overall impression of the book, because half the time, I wasn't quite certain who was speaking. The themes and overarching stories are great, and the characters do have unique personality traits. But at times, their words felt interchangeable, and I only felt moved by spoken passages when one person had a fairly big monologue, so I could absorb both the depth of their words and the relevance to their character arc.
I can understand why so many people love this book, but I suspect that I would have been more similarly moved if I hadn't listened to the audiobook.