Folklorn

 Folklorn by Angela Mi Young Hur, 416 pages.

Elsa Park has gone all the way to Antarctica to get as far as possible from her family and their stories (and also to pursue her doctoral physics research). Her mother used to tell her that all of the women in their family were reincarnations of the girls from her Korean folk tales, but her mother has been in a coma for decades, so now it's just her brother and father she's avoiding. But once her mother dies she is once again haunted in Sweden by her childhood imaginary friend, who drives her to look for her long lost sister and get to the heart of the stories her mother left her.

I thought all of that sounded very exciting, but that isn't a word I'd use to describe this book. I think it's probably very good, but it wasn't quite what I had expected, and I think I would have enjoyed it more if I was forty. It's complex, but also sort of slow and ambiguous. I didn't really enjoy reading it very much, but I'm sure some others would.