Stumbled across this book via Spotify’s audiobook recs and started it bc I had a long week of boring admin tasks ahead of me. It actually made me look forward to them, which is wild. Also, I loved having a separate narrator for each protagonist.
So, right, I first checked it out bc the description made it sound like each girl was doing something socially unacceptable. Like, the title drop comes from the second chapter, which is from Kyuri’s perspective. She’s a relatively nice neighbor who takes care of her artist roommate, who initially comes off as pretty sheltered. She’s also a call girl who had plastic surgery to get ahead in her career. And we listen to her talk about bringing a photo of a pop star to her consultation, as she wanted to get ahead in her field of work. She sits next to said pop star in the plastic surgery clinic and thinks about how if she had that chick’s face, she wouldn’t do things like get into dating and coworker bullying scandals.
But it’s not just about the face of some celeb who proceeds to get slut shamed for dating a boy band member that Ara (one of Kyuri’s neighbors) likes. It’s really a book about perspective, and wanting stuff others seem to have, even as they deal with their own issues. It’s obvious in the scenes like Wonna, their downstairs neighbor, musing about how carefree and happy these girls seem to be. All while dealing with a seemingly nice, yet distant husband she only married bc she wouldn’t have a mother-in-law with him (and bc it was an escape from her previous situation).
She doesn’t really hear Ara because she’s mute. She works at a hair salon, stans the most popular member of a pop group, and is overall happy to have escaped her hometown. People always seem to think she’s dimwitted, nevermind that she’s imo one of the biggest realists in the cast. Well, aside from her blindspot regarding that one pop singer and the indulgence in the slut shaming bit.
And we’ve got Miho watching it all. She’s in fine arts, managing to self-support. Yet she’s not particularly free, beginning with the bit about not cutting her long hair because of her department head and a too-nice-to-be-true rich boyfriend. Also not a saint, as she uses people she knows as inspo without any real permission. I still liked her well enough bc she treats her roommate’s occupation like an honest job (and hell, it’s a lot more honest than the drunk, cheating businessmen she works with imo).
These characters each had an interesting perspective to follow and I didn’t really have a narrator I groaned at getting (which can happen in multi-POV novels). Also, the evolution of their relationships had my full interest. Like, there was some pretty interesting blink-and-you-will-miss foreshadowing for it, like the convos that happened around the gender of Wonna’s kid.
And the social commentary grabbed me as well. It was in the stuff like her worries about the cost of daycare and what kind of dumpster fire world she’s even bringing a kid into. And in Ara’s experiences as an unusually quiet hairdresser. And Kyuri’s discussion of entitled rich guys. And the way that Miho keeps getting treated as part of her artwork’s marketing. Plus a ton of other things. Yet somehow, it doesn’t feel like an after-school special for grown-ups.
Anyways, I was invested within a few chapters and cried (from joy) at the ending. Prob haven’t had a similar tier of literary fiction experience since like Shuggie Bain or Sirens and Muses.
Edit: Local idiot remembers the title was actually If I Had Your Face. Anyways, the author is Frances Cha
by Unheroic_