If I had Your Face (ARC Review)

If I had your face follows the stories of four women living in Korea, faced with unrealistic expectations of beauty and marriage while carrying the burdens of the traumas of their past and present as they navigate the world of idols, room salons, strict social hierarchies, and difficult economic situations.

This book was one of my top anticipated of the year and certainly delivered on what I expected from it, which was a deep dive into the darker parts of Korean culture, and some grim and hard-hitting themes. 

This novel is a debut from an otherwise accomplished journalist, and although Cha certainly knows her stuff when it comes to the topics she’s addressing, the book is far from perfect, and yet still incredibly engaging and suspenseful in a way that doesn’t often let up.

Basically, if you read books for the characters and not for the plot, then you’ll enjoy If I had your Face. With a style unlike many other contemporary adult novels, the story is less about traveling from start to finish and more about being dropped into these four women’s lives, getting to know them, and then being pulled out again once we’ve learned a good deal about them. This means that there isn’t exactly the neatest of conclusions, a warning for those who don’t like open-ended finales, but which is actually realistic to the scope of the story and matches its overall tone.

Nevertheless, I wish the book had been a bit longer, since it is relatively short for its genre, not necessarily for the purposes of the conclusion, but in order to spend more time with these girls in more contexts and depth.

A good deal of the book falls into backstory, which means that there is a fair bit of telling over showing and that the mix in timelines can sometimes cause you to re-read a sentence or two. This, mixed with the length of the chapters, which switch between the four perspectives, also means that it can take a while to come out of one section and settle into the next.

But it makes up for these imperfections by how very well it explores these characters, who each become fully-realized and realistic portraits of morally grey women. The themes that these characters portray are somewhat obvious, even from the start, but are still so intriguing that the book is hard to put down.

I rated If I had your Face 3.5 out of 5 stars but am not disappointed in the least, and will be watching to see if and when Cha embarks on the journey of another work of fiction. 

Thank you to Netgalley and Ballantine Books for the early copy in exchange for an honest review!