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Synopsis:
Feminist psychological horror about the making of a female serial killer from a Korean-American perspective.
Ji-won’s life tumbles into disarray in the wake of her appa’s extramarital affair and subsequent departure. Her mother, distraught. Her younger sister, hurt and confused. Her college freshman grades, failing. Her dreams, horrifying… yet enticing.
In them, Ji-won walks through bloody rooms full of eyes. Succulent blue eyes. Salivatingly blue eyes. Eyes the same shape and shade as George’s, who is Umma’s obnoxious new boyfriend. George has already overstayed his welcome in her family’s claustrophobic apartment. He brags about his puffed-up consulting job, ogles Asian waitresses while dining out, and acts condescending toward Ji-won and her sister as if he deserves all of Umma’s fawning adoration. No, George doesn’t deserve anything from her family. Ji-won will make sure of that.
For no matter how many victims accumulate around her campus or how many people she must deceive and manipulate, Ji-won’s hunger and her rage deserve to be sated.
A brilliantly inventive, subversive novel about a young woman unraveling, Monika Kim’s The Eyes Are the Best Part is a story of a family falling apart and trying to find their way back to each other, marking a bold new voice in horror that will leave readers mesmerized and craving more.
Review:
There is a rage inside of Ji-won. She is a college freshman, living with her mother and sister Ji-hyun in a cramped apartment. Her mother prepares huge Korean meals for their absent father because he has walked out of their lives to be with another woman, and she knows that her cooking will bring him back. On campus, Geoffrey follows Ji-won around, wants to be her friend, texting her and helping her through classes at a college she did not want to go to. And then her mother meets George.
The beginning of the novel is such a good set up for the things to come. There seems to be a tightness in the family that even though there is sadness from their father leaving. The three women have one another and they will make the best of it. When George is introduced, he is a disruption to everything in Ji-won’s life. He is a white man who appreciates Asian culture, in a racist way where he talks about how he has been all over Korea and China so he understand them. He does not take the time to learn the sisters’ names because they are too hard so he gives them nicknames. The grievances Ji-won has against George from day one are valid, and he is a scumbag. George, his behavior, and their mother’s absolute joy and love for him brings up uncontrollable anger in Ji-won. Since her family structure makes it difficult to express her distrust and hatred for George, she uses other, unhealthy activities as an outlet to her anger and rage.
The Eyes are the Best Part is a well structured, fast moving horror novel, and what makes this compelling is that we do like Ji-won. We want her to get better, to find a better way to express her emotions, and to conquer the problems that she faces. Or maybe I want her to get better. I am a man reading this book. Most of Ji-won’s feelings and anger are because the men in her life have let her down. Her father has left her family to be with another woman and start a new family, George is the piece of garbage that he is, and even Geoffrey, who says that he is a feminist, does not take her rejection to his advances in a healthy way. Ji-won’s life would be better if one single male actually treated her with care and understanding, and I feel like this leaves me as a male reader, a father to girls, as someone who wishes that she was given better. My empathy is for Ji-won throughout this whole novel, and it makes me want her to get away with the things that she does. Even though her actions are unacceptable, throughout the entire novel, I want Ji-won to be able to say at the end that freshman year of college sure was a weird one.
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