To be a teenage girl seems to necessarily mean having tension with your mother. But what if your mom wasn’t there to be mad at? What if she was somewhere else entirely? This was the reality of Eun Ji Koh’s experience, and (as it turns out), her own mother’s as well. When Eun Ji was a teenager, her South Korean parents, despite being financially secure in their lives in California, decide to return to their native country for her father to take a better-paying job. Eun Ji and her brother, technically an adult, remain behind. What was supposed to be a two-year contract is renewed, and then renewed again. Throughout their separation, Eun Ji’s mother writes her letters, which the teenager doesn’t respond to, but many of which she keeps. These letters form the basis of her memoir, The Magical Language of Others.

It’s a slim volume, only just over 200 pages, but it covers a lot of territory. She tells the story of two sets of her grandparents in South Korea, including her own mother’s mother, who left home in the face of her husband’s flagrant infidelity…and a once-abandoned daughter became a mother who left her own daughter behind. The letters Eun Ji’s mother writes her from overseas are often heart-wrenching, her desperation to communicate her love to her daughter shining through. It is easy, though, to see why they might not have been read that way by Eun Ji at the time. She goes to visit her mother occasionally, taking a Japanese class during one of these trips, but the wounds run deep and Eun Ji falls into a depression. It is by winding up in a poetry class that she finally finds the thing that really brings her back to full engagement with the world.

It’s obvious very quickly when reading this that Koh is a poet by trade. Her prose is spare and elegant, even as she writes about heartbreak and despair. But for me, I think this made for a book that didn’t have the kind of impact it could have had. It was difficult to connect with Eun Ji, despite her very sympathetic perspective. Her pain is held at a remove. On the one hand, I’m not really a fan of narratives that wallow in misery, and expecting someone to write her own story in a way that focuses almost exclusively on unhappiness isn’t what I’m after as a reader. On the other, though, if your memoir is about your struggle to reconcile yourself with your mother after she left you behind as a teenager, we have to buy in to the depth of your hurt, which means you have to let it break through every so often.

Sometimes when I’m not quite feeling a book, it’s the book’s fault…it’s failed to be executed successfully. There’s a little of that here, with Koh withholding the raw emotion that would have helped it take off. But then there are also books where I feel like I’m at fault as a reader for expecting it to be something it wasn’t trying to be. And there’s some of that here, too. There’s no indication Koh is trying and failing to write something visceral, she just decided to go for restraint. It didn’t work for me, it might work for others. I appreciated her lovely words, the way she worked with themes of language and translation and generational wounds. But I just never got into it the way I was hoping. I can’t either recommend for or against reading this, this is one of those books that will just depend on whether it resonates with you personally.