seoulmates by jen frederick

Seoulmates by Jen Frederick – Review and Thoughts

“If you’re miserable and you do nothing, you’re complicit in your own misery.”
Jen Frederick, Seoulmates

Hara Wilson is a Korean-American adoptee who has traveled to Seoul to find her biological mother. Hara wasn’t expecting to fall in love with Choi Yujun when she arrived in Korea, yet she runs into one logistical error…she comes to find that he is her stepbrother.

Seoulmates had a very well thought-out story, a romance with substance, and Frederick definitely put a lot of heart into this book.

I got super caught up in the work and family dramas and was entranced by Hara and Yujun’s love. This book also gave me a keen desire for delicious Korean food that I’ve never even tasted but looking up pictures, I craved food that I’ve never even had.

“She has had gains in her life, but sometimes it is the absence of things that sits heavy in your heart for far too long.”
Jen Frederick, Seoulmates

Not realizing there was a first book that would’ve made Hara’s backstory a little clearer, once I saw that there was a book preceding Seoulmates I think Frederick did a pretty good job summarizing the first information-heavy book up in the first 40 or so pages.

The only thing that unsettled me was the changes in spellings of names and salutations, which I assumed were just misspellings. Not being very knowledgeable of Korean language or culture, it was a bit confusing when I would come across a name or word spelled differently than before and I wondered if I had been pronouncing the name wrong and then which was the correct spelling.

Frederick was also a little repetitive with a couple of points, like going over Hara’s situation with her dads twice in the beginning and then later on saying that Yujun was discussing his father for the first time at two different instances.

“Once I said to Yujun that I did not feel like a Korean and he replied that what is a Korean but a person who has suffered and survived?”
Jen Frederick, Seoulmates

But all in all, a lovely romance to reset my soul.

Read on.

Alessandra is reading…