“Vivid and delectable. Angela Hur is equally at home working in the fertile territories of myth and the fantastic as in the nuanced portrayal of a contemporary, complex family. I loved this.”
— KELLY LINK, Pulitzer Prize Finalist, MacArthur Fellow, and National Bestselling author of GET IN TROUBLE
“Ghost story, family saga, parable, feminist reimagined myth: Angela Mi Young Hur’s hugely ambitious Folklorn is a spellbinding shape-shifter of a novel that tackles questions of race, culture, and history head-on, exploring the blurry boundaries between past and present, fact and fantasy, and personal and cultural—or cosmic.”
— CELESTE NG, author of LITTLE FIRES EVERYWHERE
“Folklorn is a work of capacious, original imagination: part supernatural mystery, part immigrant family story. Hur’s mixing and melding of genres is an inventive, elegant means of illuminating the dualities of diasporic experience, as well as a testament to the essential role of stories in understanding our identities.”
—PETER HO DAVIES, author of THE FORTUNES and A LIE SOMEONE TOLD YOU ABOUT YOURSELF
New York Times Book Review, by Amal El-Mohtar
In many ways, Angela Mi Young Hur’s FOLKLORN is also about translation: translation as physical movement, from Korea to the United States to Sweden to Antarctica; secret knowledge translated across languages and time; and translation as interpretation across genres, from folk tales and family history to experimental physics and poetry.
Dr. Elsa Park has spent years trying to get as far away from her mother’s Korean myths as possible, and with them, her mother’s conviction that the women of their family are doomed to repeat the patterns of tragic folk tales: stories of girls stolen or sacrificed, lost and recovered. Elsa is determined to choose science over superstition, but while researching neutrinos — so-called ghost particles — in Antarctica, she succumbs to an old hallucination of ringing bells and a lovely, mysterious woman with red ribbons trailing from her long black braid. Thrown off balance, Elsa pivots her research toward reconciling the stories of her inheritance with her scientific work, in order to find a way into — and more crucially, a way out of — her mother’s tales.
Elsa’s voice is an elegant punch to the face, a series of refusals — of politeness, of fellow feeling, of any intimacy separate from brutality. She’s sometimes shockingly, almost helplessly cruel to people attempting to be kind to her, as if speaking around a mouth full of broken glass. I found myself loving her for the messiness of her overlapping truths, the mixture of resentment, fear, love and anger directed at her family, colleagues and would-be lovers.
Integral to “Folklorn” is a sense of stories as both constitution and escape, of their capacity to trap people as much by faulty representation as by erasure. When Elsa is young, her mother tells her that “our entire people have been telling the wrong stories, making a wretched mess of our history. … No wonder we get invasions and occupations, war. … What kind of stories, I wonder, do the white countries tell of themselves?” Once Elsa is grown, she paraphrases her mother despite herself, arguing that “by limiting the neutrino’s story, we’ve constrained our own cosmic existence.”
“Folklorn” loops in and out of itself like a ghost’s red-ribboned braids, like a woman’s voice harmonizing with its own echoes. It’s beautiful and hard and hungry, full of sharp, painful observations, slicing clichés open like prickly pears and devouring their hearts.
A genre-defying, continents-spanning saga of Korean myth, scientific discovery, and the abiding love that binds even the most broken of families.
Elsa Park is a particle physicist at the top of her game, stationed at a neutrino observatory in the Antarctic, confident she's put enough distance between her ambitions and the family ghosts she's run from all her life. But it isn't long before her childhood imaginary friend—an achingly familiar, spectral woman in the snow—comes to claim her at last.
Years ago, Elsa's now-catatonic mother had warned her that the women of their line were doomed to repeat the narrative lives of their ancestors from Korean myth and legend. But beyond these ghosts, Elsa also faces a more earthly fate: the mental illness and generational trauma that run in her immigrant family, a sickness no less ravenous than the ancestral curse hunting her.
When her mother breaks her decade-long silence and tragedy strikes, Elsa must return to her childhood home in California. There, among family wrestling with their own demons, she unravels the secrets hidden in the handwritten pages of her mother’s dark stories: of women’s desire and fury; of magic suppressed, stolen, or punished; of the hunger for vengeance.
From Sparks Fellow, Tin House alumna, and Harvard graduate Angela Mi Young Hur, Folklorn is a wondrous and necessary exploration of the myths we inherit and those we fashion for ourselves.
“Angela Mi Young Hur’s Folklorn is a beautiful meditation on childhood trauma as well as an exploration into Korean heritage; it’s also a gorgeous journey into the intersection of science and myth and how our past traumas shape us – but how they need not define us.”
—SWAPNA KRISHNA, NPR Books
“This soulful saga is replete with evocative settings and masterfully crafted lives.”
-NEWSWEEK, 21 Best Books to Read This Spring 2021
“Ostensibly, it is a novel about the daughter of immigrants trying to solve the mystery of what happened to her sister, but it is so much more than that. So, so, so much more. Genre-defying and emotionally unsettling, it is a book that refuses to stay in whatever category the reader wants to put it. … Just as the characters refuse to be placed in neat little boxes, so too does the narrative structure. Hur weaves in the past and present, plays with the unreliable narrator trick, and breaks up the story with grim, bloody folktales. As troubling as some of the characters’ confrontational scenes felt, they also felt true. Hur doesn’t fall back on shock value or edginess for edgy’s sake. She’s pulling from something real and dark, exposing its morally messy underbelly. … Folklorn is less fantasy and more magical realism with a splash of intensely nerdy science thrown in for good measure. Angela Mi Young Hur takes the plot down difficult paths but never loses sight of what is real, even if Elsa herself cannot tell what is true and what is false.”
—ALEX BROWN, Locus Magazine
“In this fascinating and introspective novel, science and Korean mythology intersect when a scientist grapples with her career, family, mental health, and identity as a Korean immigrant. …This novel is deeply moving, a complex tale about repressed grief, myth, and diaspora.”
—MARGARET KINGSBURY, Buzzfeed
“Angela Mi Young Hur addresses the cognitive dissonance and cultural confusion of the Korean diaspora in her ambitious and fantastical second novel, Folklorn. … extremely ambitious in scope, and the writing never fails to deliver. … engagingly blends Korean folktales with literary traditions for a fresh take on both the universal story of identity and assimilation, and the national tale of han.”
—ALICE STEPHENS, Washington Independent Review of Books
“Hur writes with compassion about mental illness and identity. And while the title emphasizes the folktales, it’s the history of Korean adoption and its ramifications that make this novel unique.”
—SUSAN BLUMBERG-KASON, Asian Review of Books
“In Folklorn, Angela Mi Young Hur weaves the fantastic into the realism of a compelling family saga, creating a heartfelt novel as original as it is irresistible. Pick this up if you’re ready to not put it down.”
—MAT JOHNSON, author of PYM and LOVING DAY
“Folklorn is a spectacular book. Hur writes with virtuosity and power, weaving together the ribbons of the mythic with the complex tapestry of family and history to create a gorgeous, moving whole.”
—KAT HOWARD, author of A CATHEDRAL OF MYTH AND BONE and AN UNKINDNESS OF MAGICIANS
"With enviable ambition and swagger, FOLKLORN tosses us from one shimmering setting to another: Antarctic research station, Korean spa, Swedish archipelago, and auto body shop in Southern California. Exploring our genetic and traumatic inheritances, Angela Mi Young Hur weaves gorgeous Korean fables through a woman’s messy, international search for redemption and connection. This novel is brash, defiant and ultimately full of yearning."
—CHIA-CHIA LIN, author of THE UNPASSING
"A beautiful, liminal exploration of the world, physics, and complex families born and found, told with an added rush of the fantastic."
—FRAN WILDE, Nebula Award-winning author of UPDRAFT and RIVERLAND
“Dark, difficult, and riveting—Folklorn gave me endless trouble, and I appreciate it.”
—R. F. Kuang, Astounding Award-winning author of THE POPPY WAR
“Haunting and spiritual and touching, and so unique. This is absolutely one to be cherished.”
—TOR.COM, 30 MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2021
“Blurring the lines between sci-fi and fantasy, Hur’s sophomore novel (after The Queens of K-Town) offers a complex meditation on intergenerational trauma . . . The honest look at prickly Elsa’s internalized racism is ambitious but often brutal in its unflinching execution…. conversations on minority life in majority white spaces are painfully accurate. This thought-provoking work will appeal to SFF fans who like their talk of particle physics side by side with fox spirits and fairy tales.”
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
“…her story is gripping and rings as true as the bell she hears in her mind. A quiet but compelling rumination on family, race, and trauma, built on the spaces in Korean folktales.”
—KIRKUS REVIEWS
Bustle: “Read These Books Based On Myths & Fairy Tales…”
Thrillist: “30 Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2021”
Also recommended in DEN OF GEEK’s inaugural issue!
INDIE NEXT LIST pick for May!
“At its heart, FOLKLORN is a haunting and lyrical novel about mythology, science, generational trauma, and identity – but it is also so much more. I took my time reading this since I wanted to really stop and think about the questions it raised. A truly memorable, genre-bending reading experience!”
—Grace Rajendran, University Bookstore, WA
“Hur's tale is brutal and haunting, bringing a feminist perspective to generational trauma and internalized racism. While the locales are stunning (Antarctica, Scandinavia, and a Korean Spa), Elsa Park is the beating heart of this story. Watching her come into her own is an achingly vulnerable affair that will resonate strongly with women everywhere.”
—Laura Graveline, Brazos Bookstore, TX
“This fairy tale-like ghost story about family, generational trauma, and the mythologies that connect us is lyrical, elegiac, introspective, and simply gorgeous. At moments, terrifyingly real in its exploration of abuse, at other times, scintillating with magic, FOLKLORN is a meditation on family--both personal and cultural. Like stitching up a wound, Angela Mi Young Hur weaves Korean mythology, physics, and an aching story of trauma into something impossible and beautiful and--just maybe--healing.”
—Nicole Szymd, Old Firehouse Books, CO
Purchase at your favorite indie or from these other sites, thank you!
Early Reader Reviews
It’s not easy to get review coverage for a novel, especially one published by a new independent small press. Thus, I’m very grateful for these early reviews from readers, bloggers, academics, translators. These were the first reviews that with their generous insight, sensitivity and thoughtfulness, gave me hope that my book was connecting with some readers, who got what I was trying to do. Thank you!
Moon’s Review
It’s been two weeks since I read Folklorn. I cried, I closed it, I sighed, and then started ruminating how to speak about it. It has accompanied me to the grief of recent events, it has been in the back of my mind when I watched the Spanish trailer of Minari without a trace of a Korean word in it. This novel has opened a lot of bottled emotions that I didn’t know where to put them. That has been Folklorn to me.
As a child of Korean immigrants in Spain, I’ve always have had trouble with the concept of home. An insane obsession, like the portal fantasy trope of voracious reader that finds refuge in fiction, to shield themselves from reality. Now this novel, this hit home. Not the idealistic version in which I would like to be, but the real, gritty and flawed home that my own identity inhabits. Sometimes I see my kid singing to “Let it go”, or “Into the Unknown” to the top of her lungs and feeling it, but to me, the Elsa that adventured on the hidden places of my own self is Elsa Park, main character of Folklorn.
We meet Korean American Elsa Park reminiscing her mother and her Korean folktales, giving us her own description and image of a key part of her own self. After that quick glance, we move with Elsa to her present—she’s an experimental physicist looking for neutrinos (ghost particles) in the South Pole station. Loudmouthed, navigating racism with her own prejudices and bias, overt and upfront against sexism, she’s a force to be reckoned with, that’s for sure. But the stitches of the wound healed by her excellency are plain to see: “you are like one of us”, they tell her, displacing her from the here and there, forcing her to inhabit those liminal spaces in-between (one of the major themes of the novel, and the big reason it hits home). Sleep deprived and exhausted, Elsa starts hearing a bell. After discarding it as tinnitus, she decides to skip a party to get the rest she needs, but it in that moment, she’s reunited to a childhood imaginary friend that embodies her mother’s Korean folktales. She will then embark in a journey of self-discovery within the darkness of the big shadow cast by those before her.
Folklorn is a beast. Korean folklore is seamlessly interwoven in the story, playing and enhancing the great amount of layers that the story offers. Angela Mi Young Hur uses Elsa’s little microcosmos to unravel, unpack and showcase some of the nuances and experiences of what Korean diaspora means. Her parents generation, with their hustles, the trauma they directly or indirectly caused in search of a better life; her brother Chris, who has some of the scenes that will live freely and forever in my brain, who has to make sense of who he is after being told the lie that A+B will get you to C, but that, after all, he’s incredibly devoted so that her sister can shine; Swedish Korean adoptee Oskar Gantelius (hottest Korean in fiction as of now), who provides the excellent contraposition between the differences in racism between the American experience and the colorblind European experience, while also giving way to describing the particularities of what it means to be othered, to belong, to be oneself in the adoptee experience.
It was really hard to find a metaphor to describe Folklorn, but now I feel that the answer has been in front of me all the time: Taeguk. As Wikipedia says, not to be confused with the Pepsi Globe, a representation of the Taeguk is in the center of the South Korean flag. Red and blue forces interlocking and forming a new entity—and Folklorn is that, a tapestry of dualisms that showcase the Korean diaspora experience. The differences between the good daughter and the good son, the hyonyeo and hyoja, offered both in the form of traditional folktales (like Shim Cheong), and with the translated or derived forms embodied by Chris and Elsa. Mythomania against a harsh reality ridden with trauma, with all the characters trying to make peace with their grief and all the pieces that are part of their own selves… And like the swirl of the Taeguk, Hur is capable of loading the present-story with a lot of symbolism that is from the ‘source material’: the bells, the tinnitus, Shim Cheong’s father and Elsa’s… There are lots of details here and there that move your guts while also fill your brain with awe. It is that good.
Folklorn doesn’t shy away of the violence. Like traditional folktales (and not the exaggeratedly sweetened versions we are force-fed in mainstream media), there’s a history of emotional abuse, inadvertent or overt. All characters are not saint-like heroes or plain victims—they made their choices, they made their mistakes, and sometimes they own them and try their best. There’s hustle, fighting, survival, but not in a preachy-tone. It is just what it is. And like the dualism pointed before, Hur also offers a lot of poignant humor, punching fists to everything in her way, even daring to break the fourth wall just to make a point (and give you the laugh). Yes, she’s in control, and WHAT. A. RIDE.
It’s March but I know that this novel is going to be my favorite of this year. This review is my feeble attempt to give it the sixth star that it deserves.
Tuerlemot - Literary Review for the Indie Press
Identity is bound up in storytelling; it’s a function of language both forging connections and drawing lines. Elsa tells and re-tells her family story through these folktales. They are both a way to articulate her experience and to interpret it. […]
Fittingly, the narrative traverses several genre-spaces: part fantasy, part sci-fi, part romance, part ghost story, part mytho-historiography, Folklorn is a novel that challenges its readers to in multiple ways simultaneously. Is Elsa in tune with the spiritual or is she just crazy? Is her search for her lost sister reflect a genuine desire for truth, or a deluded obsession? Does she just need a good life coach?
Hur is trying to get us to see that just by asking these questions, we are drawing up dichotomies that force us to totalize our reading of the novel. Folklorn is a novel that cannot simply be read one way. [...]
Folklorn is trying to do for the reader what Elsa’s mother’s stories do for her: pierce through that flatness. Elsa’s mother has inherited a wealth of stories, which interweave with personal experiences and family history. They form a poetic self-history, somehow both dark and vibrant. She too passes these on, albeit in a cryptic form. Perhaps she becomes ambivalent about their power to hold meaning in this new land; perhaps their weight is too much. It’s never clear just why she withholds them. Perhaps they are simply something Elsa has to search for, their richness only visible with active pursuit.
While Folklorn is ostensibly focused on the Asian-American experience, Hur is telling a deeper human story that speaks to all readers: a story about the power of myth making and the yearning for connection. Hur’s prose is dizzyingly quick. You may need stop and gather your bearings after every chapter. For a novel as carefully meditative as this one, it can hardly sit still. Elsa flits from situation to situation with a sort of manic energy. But Hur manages this constant motion with deft, flexible prose.
Folklorn remains conceptually and emotionally dense, and yet as a read, it is light and vibrant. Hur manages to tackle sometime timeless issues with a narrative that is sharply relevant. I’m not sure how she quite pulls this off. This is one of those books you can go back and read over and over again, peeling away layer after layer like an onion. And like with onions, reader be warned, tears may follow.
Reading Under the Olive Tree
A story on intergenerational trauma, postmemory, and migration, Folklorn by Korean American Swedish writer Angela Mi Young Hur follows the curious trajectory of Elsa, an experimental physicist who studies neutrinos, as she questions the dichotomy between the real and the imaginary, symbols and numbers– and truth-telling and tale-spinning. […]
The way Elsa begins her story is telling; it foresees the questions that she ceaselessly asks herself, as well as the answers she seeks throughout the novel. Intertwined questions on motherhood, family values, displacement, culture, and race drive the narrative, as Hur masterfully moves beyond the dividing line between past, present, and future. […]
Folklorn is a contemporary origin story that seamlessly weaves Korean folklore within a narrative of identity, migration, and home.
Elsa believes that she always chooses science “for its reliable, stable certainties because the rules and empirical evidence diminished my mother and disenchanted her, got me further from home.” However, as the parallel between her research and personal struggles becomes explicit, so does the close link between the personal and the cosmic. We can see Elsa’s desire to challenge the perception of neutrinos and, albeit subconsciously at first, of identity as monolithic. […]
Although neutrinos change identities according to the Standard Model, Elsa’s focus shifts to what happens during the process of shape-shifting. She ruminates that the reason she became a physicist wasn’t the curiosity or “the willingness to believe in the unexpected,” but she realizes that something in her is changing; thinking like an artist, a story-teller, makes her a better scientist.
And we, as readers, are here to observe and relish the process of her transformation.
Bookish Brews
Folklorn follows a Korean-American physicist, running away from the culture and folktales of her family and grounding herself in the solid concrete nature of science. Only to find out that you can’t escape your history, and science reflects our lives more than we think.
I honestly don’t even know how to review this book. It was beautiful, challenging, eye-opening. The integration of physics to ground Elsa, and to ground me, with the magical exploration of long told and oft lost folktales was stunning. Elsa’s search for herself pushed me to also search for myself within the pages, only to find myself just about as well as she did, in a constant journey. […]
All the way down to the moment where we realize that those of us of the diaspora have full right to the stories of our ancestors. It is all deeply important.
CB_Read
The first thing I have to say about Angela Hur’s "Folklorn" is that the book is a gift to the imagination. The novel is sprawling, narratively and geographically, and it leads the reader through a meandering, maze-like fantasy. The experience of reading the novel felt like if I didn’t pay attention, I would risk losing a detail that would become significant later, as the little details often were. No single genre can contain this story, but elements of mythology, memoir, and contemporary fiction come together like a chorus that brings this novel to life. […]
The story of "Folklorn" then becomes a novel of metaphysical journeying through Korean folklore. By going through these stories, Elsa is able to better understand herself, her family, and take the appropriate steps to process a generation’s worth of repressed emotions and unanswered questions. But there is also a lighter side to these stories. Elsa’s character is richly developed and alternates between being a driven scientist with her colleagues, a dedicated daughter to her father, and a quirky sister with her brother. There are also many scenes that examine the pitfalls of multiculturalism and the pervasive racism of people in Western countries; as a post-doc at a Swedish university, Elsa experiences similar and unique prejudices to living the US. And there so many moving passages throughout the novel—on the beauty of science, the metaphysics of identity, and the nuances of love—weaved into the mythological narrative that you begin to forget what kind of novel you are reading.
The answer is simple: "Folklorn" is engaging, unique, and memorable.
Reading Under Street-Lamps
There was no one perfect in this story — not Elsa, and not her ghosts. And I think that is the point, to not love them for being perfect, but to empathize. And this, Hur does through the myths, that are told from so many different perspectives: her mother’s, that shows the tragedy of the tales, and how women across all ages were sacrificed for one reason or another, be it love or greed, how being a woman is living a tragedy; Elsa’s, that showed the strength of the women sacrificed, giving them not a delicate shape, but one of a survivor — cruel and ugly and real; and Oskar’s, who showed the myths as we might interpret them at first glance, as that of a myth. And seen through these many lenses, the myths gain a life and body of their own, they become as dimensional as any character in the story.
Hur delved into a lot of different themes throughout the book — generational trauma, mental disorders, that feeling of being disconnected from one’s culture, and not least of all the mythologies that shape those cultures, importance of family, and importance of human connection. And the lot of these were done quite impressively, if you take a moment to stop and think about the book.
Folklorn is a deeply cogitative, and emotionally gritty tale, that through its telling, compels you to not only think of the characters and the place they hold in their worlds, but also you, and the place you hold in yours. It seamlessly weaves the magic of ghosts into the trauma of being haunted by one — both living and dead, and forces you to recognize, alongside the characters, what the most important aspects of living are.
Also, I really want to take a moment here to commend the writing, which was so metaphorical and fantastical, and if I were to stop spouting poetry — fucking good, that I couldn’t discern if it was a story I was reading, or an epic poem.