The Healing Season of Pottery

May 1, 2024

Award-winning Somin makes her English-language debut. Jungmin is burned out and quits her job. Then she stumbles on a charming pottery studio whose warmth, coffee, and clay help her feel alive again. As Jungmin spends the year creating pots and connecting with others at the studio, she appreciates the changes in her life and contemplates a new love. Prepub Alert.

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Starred review from September 1, 2024
"Predictable" may not seem like high praise, but it can be when familiarity promises sigh-inducing comfort, as in Yeon's exquisite, winsome Korean import, warmly translated by Clare Richards. Work burnout, new directions, new friends, new love, and, most important, a cat--that's all here, thrown together with the creation of pottery. After imploding her TV-writing career, Jungmin became a shut-in prisoner in her once idyllic Chestnut Burr Village flat. Nine months later, with a literal scream, she finally ventures outside in long sleeves and trousers, unaware that summer has arrived. She walks into a pottery workshop, mistaking it for a caf�, where two women welcome her to join their coffee break. The deliciousness of the iced beverage, the women insist, is found in their cups, handmade ceramics of jade celadon and white porcelain. When they invite Jungmin to make one of her own, her wariness transforms into fascination, and she's convinced to sign up for lessons. "Firing pottery is like lighting a fire in your heart," she learns. The studio becomes her restorative haven, where she builds new relationships, repairs old wounds, dares new hopes, and considers other futures, all while nurturing new artistic, personal, and professional skills. Yeon's author's note reveals autobiographical overlaps, turning the novel into an even more intimate gift.

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October 1, 2024
After breaking down at work and retreating into her apartment for almost a year, a 30-year-old television writer finds herself again through pottery. Spending months with the shades down, sleeping her time away, and ignoring the changing seasons, Jungmin needs to dosomething. When she finally emerges from her apartment, she doesn't know where she's going or what she's looking for. She stumbles on a pottery shop, enters, and receives a cup of coffee and a warm welcome. Accepting the offer of shop owner and teacher Johee to return, Jungmin first learns how to make plates and shallow bowls, then graduates to coffee cups and vases. She begins to get to know the regulars: Gisik, who plans to quit his job at a teleshopping firm and open up his own pottery workshop near the sea; Jihye, a graduate student who is fond of cooking and drinking but has had trouble finding a job; Jun, studying hard for his university exams; Gyuwon, who turns out to be the father of a dear childhood friend; and others. Together the group forms a community that fills the empty parts of Jungmin's heart. Slowly, she begins to write again, this time small stories and vignettes for the workshop's Instagram posts. Regrettably, the English translation of this debut novel leaves unexplained and untranslated many culturally specific elements that will be bewildering for readers unfamiliar with Korean language or culture, rendering murky many of the novel's nuances and the characters' interactions. A drama of growth and rediscovery mostly lost in translation.

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