The Rainfall Market - You Yeong-Gwang - ★★.¼

AUTHOR: You Yeong-Gwang

TRANSLATOR: Slin Jung

GENRE: Korean Fantasy.

PUBLICATION DATE: November 28, 2024.

RATING: 2.25 stars.

In a Nutshell: A cozy fantasy about a girl who ends up in a world within our world and discovers the secret of happiness. Overly simplistic writing, a mostly episodic plot, flat characters. I have a strong feeling that something went wrong in the translation as well. Might work better for YA readers, as it was promoted as a YA novel when released in Korea.

Plot Preview:

Outside the city where Serin stays, there’s a rundown abandoned house in a place called Rainbow Town. Rumour has it that if you send a letter about your misfortunes to this house, you might receive a mysterious ticket. If you bring this ticket to the house on the first day of the rainy season, you are permitted to enter the magical Rainfall Market, where you can choose to change your life to the one you want.

Serin never thought that she would actually be lucky when she penned her woes and posted the letter to the house. Now the holder of a special golden ticket, Serin knows that going to the market is the only way of swapping her lonely life for one with a better future. Of course, there are certain conditions to this, but Serin is hopeful of being able to handle them, especially with the help of her new feline companion Issha.

The story comes to us in Serin’s third-person perspective.

This novel garnered a cult following in South Korea after securing crowdfunding to be published, then being acquired by a local Korean independent publisher Clayhouse, where it sold 30K copies during its first month on sale and became a number one bestselling e-book, and also reaching number three in the physical chart. Overall, it has sold more than 100K copies in South Korea. Translation rights have been sold in 20 languages.

In other words, please take my review with a pinch of salt.

Bookish Yays:

🌈 Issha the spirit cat who behaves more like a dog. The best character of this story.

🌈 The ‘moral’, or life lesson that Serin learns. Mature adults already know it, but good to see it confirmed through fiction.

🌈 The book cover. Tough for me to resist such art!

Bookish Mixed Bags:

🌤️ Serin as a character. While she has her strengths as well, she feels overly naïve at times, taking too long to notice what should have been obvious.

🌤️ The fantastical creatures from Korean mythology called the Dokkaebi. I don’t think the book described them accurately because they are supposed to be “Korean goblins”, but the book insisted mainly that they “look human but aren’t” and didn’t offer anything else. That said, I did like some of the dokkaebi characters.

🌤️ The descriptions of the rainfall market and the myriad rainbows in the book, both physical and metaphorical, seem good at the start. But after a point, it gets trickier to understand the setting. It’s a strange world, with magical elements as well as things from our world such as computers and casinos. Moreover, the rain-related metaphors feel overdone after a while.

🌤️ Though there is an overarching plot, the book, especially the first two-thirds or so, feels mostly like one episodic adventure after another. There are new characters in every chapter, most of whom don’t return once their chapter is over. The final few chapters work somewhat better in this regard. (The book would make a great studio Ghibli movie... for kids.)

Bookish Nays:

⛈️ For some reason, Serin’s age is not revealed at all. She sounds anywhere between 8 to 18 in various chapters, making it very tough to understand how to decode her behaviour.

⛈️ Except for the mentions of taekwondo and the dokkaebi (which are anyway inaccurately depicted), nothing in the book feels Korean. Many characters even have Western names such as Emma, Bill, and Nicole. One breakfast scene has UK/European dishes. There’s no point to reading a Korean book if it doesn’t offer Korean vibes.

⛈️ The translation is not too fluid. The overly simple writing adds to the MG feel of the book. There is also too much telling.

⛈️ The pacing is quite slow paced and even gets somewhat repetitive in between.

⛈️ A couple of major subplots are left incomplete, and a reveal at the end even puts into question some of the story arcs that were apparently settled.

⛈️ The mention of winning a golden ticket and visiting a magical place might have immediately made you recollect Roald Dahl’s ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ or Meg Shaffer’s ‘The Wishing Game’. However, these books had far more depth to their storylines as the writing involved a contest and there were other participants adding to the challenge. This Korean book gets a tad boring as the other ticket holders don’t get page space for most of the book. The thrill of the challenge is missing, making the story mostly one-noted.

All in all, I had picked up this book as a cozy fantasy for adults. But it started feeling much too cozy and I began wondering if I had got the target age group wrong. I am also not sure if the gap between intent and content is because of this being the author’s debut work or because of a poor translation of the original. But no matter which one it is, I didn’t find this living up to the promise made.

Online articles show that the original had been marketed as a coming-of-age fantasy in Korea, aiming at the YA crowd. I wonder why the UK promotions don’t aim at YA readers. At least we could have gone in with the right expectations. The writing feels so basic that most of it, barring the age-inappropriate scenes such as the one in the casino, would even work for middle-graders. I don’t know if my experience would have been the same if I had gone into this anticipating a middle-grade or YA fantasy. But as it is marketed as a general fantasy, I expected deeper content, and the end result didn’t match up.

I guess YA readers could give this book a go and see if the Korean hype is justified. If you can read Korean, (or any language other than English that the book is available in), then I’d suggest you give that language a go because the English translation certainly doesn’t do the book any favours. If you enjoyed books like ‘The Midnight Library’, then too you might give this book a try as it has a similar kind of underlying philosophy but without the post-life aspects.

My thanks to Penguin Random House - Michael Joseph for providing the DRC of “The Rainfall Market” via NetGalley. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book. Sorry this didn’t work out better.