Hello, I Love You by Katie M. Stout
Friday, July 03, 2015
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Publication Date: June 9, 2015
Pages: 304
Source: purchased
Buy It: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Book Depository
A teen escapes to a boarding school abroad and falls for a Korean pop star in this fun and fresh romantic novel in the vein of Anna and the French Kiss.Grace Wilde is running—from the multi-million dollar mansion her record producer father bought, the famous older brother who’s topped the country music charts five years in a row, and the mother who blames her for her brother’s breakdown. Grace escapes to the farthest place from home she can think of, a boarding school in Korea, hoping for a fresh start.She wants nothing to do with music, but when her roommate Sophie’s twin brother Jason turns out to be the newest Korean pop music superstar, Grace is thrust back into the world of fame. She can't stand Jason, whose celebrity status is only outmatched by his oversized ego, but they form a tenuous alliance for the sake of her friendship with Sophie. As the months go by and Grace adjusts to her new life in Korea, even she can't deny the sparks flying between her and the KPOP idol.Soon, Grace realizes that her feelings for Jason threaten her promise to herself that she'll leave behind the music industry that destroyed her family. But can Grace ignore her attraction to Jason and her undeniable pull of the music she was born to write? Sweet, fun, and romantic, this young adult novel explores what it means to experience first love and discover who you really are in the process. -- Goodreads
Hello, I don’t love
you, Hello, I Love You and I have
loads to say on the matter. (Warning:
the following review contains some spoilers.)
Before I get too into the plot, let’s touch upon this
title. I have heard a range of
speculation behind the title. However,
the 1960s band, The Doors, has a song
of the same name as the book title. This
fact may go over most teens’ heads.
Unless you are familiar with 60s rock, I don’t think this was the best
title choice.
If you are expecting something along the lines of Ink by Amanda Sun, where she constantly
uses Japanese and discusses the aspects of living in Japan, you might just want
to pick up something else. Grace doesn’t
know Korean. And as much as she is going
to school in Korea, readers would not have been able to tell if it wasn’t
stated. There was nothing that stood out
that told me, “Yes, that is in Korea.” Yes, the locations mentioned are in
Korea but the way every setting in the book is described is so generic.
Can we talk about the Korean language and how it was used in
Hello, I Love You?
Grace does not know Korean, nor does she have any interest
in learning the language. This fact and
many more traits made me highly dislike her character. I’ve read quite a few reviews that point out
that she, miraculously, meets people who speak enough English to have full
conversations with her; this is not uncommon.
Especially since, she is enrolled in an international school and in South
Korea, they begin teaching English in early grade school.
Jason happens to share the same beginners’ Korean class as
Grace. It is mentioned in passing that
he is there because he can’t read Korean.
I am unsure at what research was done for this novel but the Korean
language is super easy to read. It may
look difficult but you can, seriously, learn how to read Korean in less than 15 minutes.
Grace makes a comment:
"Call me antisocial, but in my defense, it’s hard to make friends with people who refuse to speak your language outside the classroom” (59).Did I say I dislike Grace yet? She never understood that she was in a different country. A country where English is not their first language. If she wanted to get along with people, all she had to do was pay close attention to her Korean language course.
She constantly complained about, not only, no one speaking
English (which was not true, considering she found a whole circle of friends
who were happy to speak with her in her language) but also Korea’s culture as a
whole. She complained about everything. If Grace had done research before choosing to
come to South Korea, she would have easily found out that chopsticks are the
major utensils used, Korean is spoken everywhere, and KPop is semi-popular.
Grace’s complaining and her, overall, character was written
off as her suffering from culture shock.
Last I knew, culture shock does not turn people into jerks.
There was nothing wrong with Stout’s writing. I didn’t find anything particularly special,
considering I was already seething over Grace’s character. However, I am so interested to find out the
reasoning behind Jason’s last name, Bae (배). Bae is an extremely rare last name
(Wikipedia). I can’t help but wonder if Stout was giving readers a push in Jason’s direction,
wanting us—by the end of Hello, I Love
You—to be screaming, “Jason is bae!” (That was a bad joke, but who knows,
it could be possible.)
I found it odd that Stout did not mention kimchi (pictured above), one of
Korea’s staple foods (the next being rice) until more than halfway through the
novel. Plus (again I have no knowledge of what Stout’s research consisted of
for her to write this), most dorms in South Korea are not (and never will be,
at least in the near future) co-ed because of their strict traditional nature. They have some sort of security which keeps
the opposite sex out of the certain dormitories. However, at Stout’s international school,
dorming was (oh, my gosh) very co-ed.
Now Hello, I Love You
would have gotten two stars, except that the ending was similar to that of
Korean dramas. And I love my Korean
dramas. Considering I found Grace
dislikable and offensive, it astounds me that throwing in some clichés of
Korean television really turns my opinion around. HERE is a list of all those Kdrama clichés
and most of them can also be found in Hello,
I Love You.
However, there was enough wrist grabbing in the book to fill
more than two Kdramas. (The picture is
from City Hunter, which was mentioned
in Hello, I Love You.)
I must admit that Hello,
I Love You seemed to be the book that I would expect from an American
trying to write a Kdrama. Similar to the
way I felt Americans were portrayed in Kdrama, especially in Heirs, Stout followed with the exact
portrayal of Korea in Hello, I Love You. In Heirs,
one of the Americans was depicted as not polite and very simple-minded. In Hello,
I Love You, Korea was constantly put down through the perspective of the
protagonist, Grace, and never fully appreciated at all. In the video below, you can see a scene from Heirs, where the one of the only
Americans on the show mistakes red bean powder for some drug.
If you want to read a book about rich people falling in love
in a fictional place with a factual name, then this is the book you should definitely
be reading. I may be judging it too
harshly—mainly, because I feel so close to Korea’s culture (having lived there
for a while)—but I think Hello, I Love
You was a tremendous letdown. If it
wasn’t for Stout’s love in Kdrama and her use of Kdrama clichés, I would never
have gotten through this.
2 comments
I've been on the fence about reading this one. I love the title (The Doors are the best!) and the cover, plus the synopsis sounds good. But I've read several reviews like yours and I'm thinking this is going to be a pass for me. Great review!!
ReplyDeleteI was super excited to read this one but after your review I think I'll just stick to K-drama watching, I'd rather re-watch City Hunter than be disappointed. Thanks so much for this amazing review!
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Betsy @ I Sold My Soul For Books