A Twist of Fate - Se-ah Jang - ★★.¾

AUTHOR: Se-ah Jang

TRANSLATOR: S.L. Park

GENRE: Psychological Suspense.

PUBLICATION DATE: July 29, 2025

RATING: 2.75 stars.

In a Nutshell: A Korean suspense thriller about two women whose lives change after one encounter. The first half is good enough, the final quarter goes bonkers. Morally ambiguous characters, regular twists, dysfunctional family, decent pacing, too much repetitive rambling, soap-opera feels. Reads a bit YA. Not sure if the negatives are because of the translation, but they certainly aren’t *only* because of the translation. Better to read after suspending disbelief.

Plot Preview:

Jae-young is on the run. Not just from her dead-end job and her cramped apartment, but also from a possible murder allegation. While on the train to Seoul trying to decide where to go, she meets a talkative young woman carrying her infant son. The mother seems to also be running from her past, as her husband left her for another woman. She is now on her way to the in-laws she has never met, hoping that her baby would clear the path for some kind of refuge. Jae-young, tired of the conversation, excuses herself and walks out of the compartment. When she returns, the mother is nowhere to be seen, but she has left her bags and her wailing baby behind with a note asking Jae-young to take him to his grandparents in Seoul. With no other choice, Jae-young decides to drop off the baby, hoping for a cash reward in return. But when she sees the opulent mansion, her intention changes, especially when the family, having never met their daughter-in-law, assume Jae-young to be her and welcome her. Can Jae-young become someone else and get a fresh start?

The story comes to us in the first-person perspectives of Jae-young and another key character.

Bookish Yays:

🤩 Great potential. I know many reviewers would be reminded of the novel ‘Strangers on a Train’ by Patricia Highsmith just because of the… well… strangers on the train bit, but a more accurate comparison in terms of tropes and genre would be with ‘I Married a Dead Man’ by Cornell Woolrich.

🤩 Despite the somewhat simplistic writing, the story kept me hooked. The initial quarter or so delivers especially well.

🤩 The portrayal on the realities of Korean society, such as class and gender differences and the contrast between the wastefulness of the wealthy and the frugality of the struggling.

🤩 The cover – absolutely stunning! I am not even a big fan of Korean works (whether books or TV shows or movies or music), but this cover made me get the book.

Bookish Mixed Bags:

🤔 The story is quite twisty, with regular surprises coming our way. Some are guessable. Some not. However, as the book progresses, the twists get wilder and wilder until they feel overly exaggerated.

🤔 The book starts off as a decent domestic drama, the middle is more like a psychological suspense, and the final quarter goes almost into Gothic thriller territory. Many scenes in each section are good but the transitions are jarring.

Bookish Nays: (Most of my Nays are writing-related issues, but I cannot say if the problem is in the original writing alone or in the translation as well. But I am pretty sure that it is not just a translation problem.)

🥴 There is no consistency to the character detailing, especially in case of Jae-young. It feels like the lead pair have abrupt manic mood swings. I like having complex grey characters, but they need to be convincing as well.

🥴 All the characters sound like young adults in tone. It is tough to believe that they are in their thirties.

🥴 The two first-person perspectives have no individuality to them. Both sound very similar.

🥴 There is way too much of rambling in Jae-young’s POV, and mostly focussed on the same 2-3 thoughts. After a point, the repetition gets annoying. There are also too many interrupted conversations and secrets.

🥴 The writing style is quite odd, making it tough at times to understand the exact speaker in scenes with conversations. There are frequent insertions of past memories in between present scenes to offer background information – this is somewhat clunky in execution.

🥴 The final quarter feels completely unhinged. The ending is unbelievably farfetched, and the epilogue contains an extended infodump full of explanation. The change in one character’s arc is almost like a deus ex machina twist – not convincing.

🥴 The translation is not smooth even beyond the basic writing issues. Like, the emergency number in Korea is not 911. When the setting is Seoul, why is the US emergency number used in the plot? In contrast, there are multiple references to the significance of 12th December in Korea, but are we ever told what happened on 12th December? Nope!

All in all, this is a good enough option if you are ready to suspend all disbelief and go with the flow. The regular twists and the dark turns can be entertaining enough. The writing (either the original plotting or the translation or possibly, both) needed to be stronger and is the main reason this doesn’t deliver better. For a debut novel, it does get the ingredients of a psych-suspense right.

Recommended to psychological suspense fans who are more accustomed to suspending disbelief while reading this genre.

My thanks to Random House Publishing Group – Ballantine and Bantam for providing the DRC of “A Twist of Fate” via NetGalley. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.