We Carry the Sea in Our Hands - Janie Kim - ★★★.¾

AUTHOR: Janie Kim

NARRATOR: Michelle H. Lee

GENRE: Literary Fiction.

PUBLICATION DATE: July 9, 2024

RATING: 3.75 stars.

In a Nutshell: A literary fiction debut that encompasses several themes and subgenres within its plot. Complex, chaotic, compelling! The first half left me befuddled, but the second half cleverly brought all the arcs together. Recommended, but it would help if you are a science nerd.

Plot Preview:

Twenty-four-year old Abby has only recently found out that she is a “drop-box baby”, a Korean orphan abandoned as an infant. She has no clue about her birth parents. When her adoptive parents – American father and Korean mother – struggle with their marriage, Abby was yet again thrown into the foster care system, only to be adopted again by a Korean-origin couple, whose daughter Iseul ends up as Abby’s best friend.

Now, all these years later, Abby works with sea slugs, using them to research the origins of life. She also decides to look for her birth parents. Meanwhile, Iseul is an investigative journalist whose career path and love for her terminally sick brother leads her towards black market medicine. One event changes the trajectory of Abby’s personal and professional life.

The story comes to us in Abby’s first-person perspective.

Bookish Yays:

👌🏻 The fact that Abby was adopted twice, and each adoption was different from the other, makes the adoption angle an interesting one.

👌🏻 The way Abby established parallels between her “origins of life” research and her own life story i.e. the origin of her life, is nicely brought out.

👌🏻 Sea slugs get much focus in the narrative, thanks to Abby’s research as well as Iseul’s latest assignment using sea slugs. The facts were fascinating!

👌🏻 There is plenty of science-y stuff in the book, even beyond slug facts. The insight into lab culture, the gender discrimination in STEM fields, the importance of grants and promotions in research – all get highlighted realistically. The author is a biology PhD student at Stanford University, which is probably why it all sounds genuine. There is also a lot of technical scientific data, which non-nerds might not enjoy so much but I loved. (Nerd Alert!) I found everything related to science fabulous!

👌🏻 As Abby, her first adoptive mother, and her later adoptive parents are Korean, we get a glimpse of many Korean beliefs and rituals. There is also a fair number of Korean words in the plot, which adds to the authenticity and complexity.

👌🏻 This is a character-focussed literary work, so the pacing, though slower, gives us much to ponder over. The prose is also lyrical, but not so much as would feel over the top.

👌🏻 The author’s note, which explains in detail how much of the science in the book is fact and how much a fabrication. Mind-blowing!

Bookish Mixed Bags:

🤞🏻 Abby’s character isn’t so appealing at the start as she is a perfect specimen of her age. Many of her thoughts are self-absorbed, and it takes some time for her to stop moaning about her life and grow a spine. That said, she’s a interestingly complex character for the lead role as it is tough to understand if what she experiences is real or hallucinatory.

🤞🏻 The secondary characters are interesting, but except for Iseul, most don’t have much depth. They pop in only to the extent needed, so we get just a limited look at their personality. I would have loved a dual narrative with a second perspective coming from Iseul; she seemed fascinating. But I do understand why this wasn’t possible as the story was essentially Abby’s.

🤞🏻 The overloaded ‘kitchen sink’ of themes exists in this debut as well. I initially felt like the story was bombarding me with core themes: sea slug research, search for birth parents, Iseul’s investigative work, black market medicine, cancer treatment for one secondary character, a tiny thread of magical realism, Korean culture, parental abandonment, adoption issues, gender discrimination, racial discrimination, suicide, sex trafficking, found family, intergenerational trauma,… The plot sprung in so many distinct directions at once that I was befuddled about the exact point of the story. But to my utter surprise, the author successfully manages to unite most of the key points into a single multi-hued kaleidoscopic strand by the end of the book.

🤞🏻 The plot isn’t linear, so Abby’s narrative also feels a bit meandering as she goes back and forth in the timeline depending on where her memories take her. These are clearly marked in the narrative, so there’s no confusion about the time frame of the events. But the frequent time hopping, especially at the start, is tedious.

Bookish Nays:

👎🏻 There’s a lot of inner monologue at the start, which makes Abby sound even whinier. This does peter out as the book progresses, but it is still present throughout.

🎧 The Audiobook Experience:

The audiobook, clocking at a little more than 8 hours, is narrated by Michelle H. Lee. I didn’t end up a big fan of her narration. Her enunciation is good, but somehow, her voice just rubbed me off the wrong way. (This, of course, might not be the case for all listeners.) As it is, the first person had a lot of inner monologues, but the narrator’s pitch made those ramblings grate on my nerves at times.

I might have appreciated this book better had I actually read it because there was just so much happening! Of course, the narrative is a single-timeline, single-perspective story, so the confusion isn’t about who is speaking or when, but about keeping track of the myriad arcs. Audio newbies, better stick to reading.

All in all, this is a very intelligent debut that takes multiple little stories surrounding one character and weaves them into a fairly cohesive narrative. The first quarter progressed so randomly that I had given up hope of this book being a good read, especially combined with Abby’s first-person waffling. Rarely has a book proven my initial rating guess so spectacularly wrong!

Recommended to literary fiction readers with a scientific bent of mind. The start will require your patience, but the ending makes the journey worthwhile.

My thanks to Dreamscape Media for providing the ALC of “We Carry the Sea in Our Hands” via NetGalley. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the audiobook.