If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha

BATB score: 10/10 💋⭐️💃

A stunning novel by Frances Cha on modern day Korea - the idealistic desire for plastic beauty, the strides and sacrifices women has to endure, and the definition of love and affairs.

Best to: an accurate reflection of modern day societal expectations for a woman - find a rich husband, make money, manage high social circles, save up for aesthetic plastic surgery, deal with in-laws, make a son, and calibrate about maternity leave and career consequences #bravo 👏

Best for: any women would be able to relate to at least one of these four characters; "if you asked me why I married my husband, I would say it was because his mother was dead" or "someone is always looking down on someone else" or "getting pregnant is not the issue, it's that these babies keep on dying" or "anyone with her privileges has no right to be unhappy"

Best as: reminder that life is unjust and you got to hustle everyday. "I will be glad when we are almost home and the scenery will turn into rice fields and farm plots, I will be reminded of how far I have come, instead of what I cannot reach"

BATB best passage: "You have to grow up with parents whose lives become better as time goes by, so you learn that you must invest effort for life to improve. But if you grow up around people whose situations become worse as time goes on, then you think that you have to just live for today. And when I ask young people, what about the future? What will you do when the future comes and you have spent everything already? They say they will just die. And that is why Korea has the highest suicide rate in the world.”