If you are interested in Korean literature, or literature in general or just able to read I recommend entreatingly this one. It’s one of the best books I have read in a while.

Shortly it tells a story about a family whose mother suddenly vanishes and how the other family members react and deal with it. The book tells you thoroughly how the family started to think what kind of person they have really lost, their growing guilt, how they blame themselves and the others and how foolish things the lost makes you do. Through each family member’s memory it tells you what kind of person the mother Sonyo is and the same time defines what being a mother means and what mother means to the different people around her. It processed the feeling of losing someone important to you from every aspect.

It was so intense. I cried so hard on some point and I don’t usually really cry when I’m reading, like big fat tears were running down. It wasn’t all about the lost or sorrow, it was also about the compassion that belongs only inside of family and how it appears in all of us.

About the name Please Look After Mother gave me troubles at first. I constantly couldn’t stop thinking it should be “the mother”, “a mother”, “our mother”, “your mother”, any mother would do, it just sounded wrong. But when had read the book I understood it wasn’t about someone’s mother or about a person called mother, it was about the concept of Mother. Mother was a symbol of “the most important thing”.

It’s pretty short book and it was easy to read but it still felt really heavy like every sentenced would have more content than just a short line of words. As a non-English speaker the language was easy enough and I’m not even so good in English. There were some words that were related to farming or living in a country in general that I didn’t know but they weren’t that relevant so it didn’t bother me at all.

Anyway I would love to share thoughts if you have read the book or if you haven’t I hope you can read it in some point and tell me what you think about it.