Blurb:
When Yojin moves with her husband and daughter into the Dream Future Pilot Communal Apartments, she's ready for a fresh start. Located on the outskirts of Seoul, the experimental community is a government initiative designed to boost the national birth rate. Like her neighbours, Yojin has agreed to have at least two more children over the next ten years.
Yet, from the day she arrives, Yojin feels uneasy about the community spirit thrust upon her. Her concerns grow as communal child care begins and the other parents show their true colours. Your Neighbour's Table traces the lives of four women in the apartments, all with different aspirations and beliefs.
Will they find a way to live peacefully? Or are society's expectations stacked against them from the start?
Review:
A provocative, poetic tale with beautiful storytelling that paints an uncomfortably real picture of the pressures of womanhood, motherhood and the misogyny woven into the fabric of our society.
In a bizarre social experiment that offers a better life in return for having more children, we’re left to think about what we’d do - could we be pushed to allow such control over us if they promised enough? What would it take for us to agree to something like this? And what more would happen if we start. What are we willing to compromise for an acceptable life? But ultimately, it’s a story about modern life and the stress we can find in trying to do what’s expected of us.
As we move through the story, words like 'community' start to lose their meaning and become sinister - full of expectation and pressure instead of warmth and support. It balances this promise of a perfect community with the impossibility of a modern capitalist world, asking if it can ever really exist.
We hear from four women living with their husbands and children in the commune - settling in, creating relationship, dealing with their own marriages and problems as we move from odd domestic scene to another. Everything seems to normal but just slightly off and it keeps you fully on edge the whole time in a quiet, simmering kind of intensity - one that leaves you feeling slightly anticlimactic when you first close the book but then suddenly all fits into place.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
- I received a reviewers copy of this title in return for a review. It's available now with Headline.
- This title contains subjects including domestic violence and abuse.
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