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The Rainfall Market

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The Rainfall Market

By: You Yeong-Gwang, Slin Jung - translation
Narrated by: Rosa Escoda
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

AN UPLIFTING AND HEALING GIFT OF A BOOK THAT ASKS - WOULD YOU TRADE YOUR LIFE FOR ANOTHER ONE?

On the first day of the monsoon an old ramshackle building appears. This is The Rainfall Market. Inside you will find magical bookstores, hairdressers, perfumeries and anything your heart desires.

But you cannot enter without an invitation.

Serin, who lives in a small flat with her mother and dreams of a bigger, better life, can’t believe her luck when she receives a ticket inviting her to step inside The Rainfall Market.

Once inside she will have the opportunity to swap her life for a new one. A better one.

Accompanied by Isha the cat and followed by a mysterious shadow, Serin tentatively steps inside. There she is told she has just one week to choose the perfect life and find true happiness.

However, there is a catch.

If she doesn’t find her dream life, she'll be trapped inside the market forever . . .
'A warm and wondrous story [...] Gentle, affirming, and utterly transportive' JULIE LONG, author of The Teller of Small Fortunes

©2024 You Yeong-Gwang (P)2024 Penguin Audio Fantasy Genre Fiction Magical Realism World Literature Heartfelt Feel-Good Dream
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A heartfelt story told in fantastically quirky way where the hero is most definitely the cat, as it should be :)

Beautiful and Quirky

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A bit of a difficult one to rate. It's mostly in line with my expectations, and had a very similar message to "The Midnight Library". I think it would have been very well suited to be a webtoon or a graphic novel, owing to the episodic nature of each of the adventures, but it didn't come across badly as a book.

It's very much an acquired taste, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone coming in with expectations of high stakes and big battles. It reads a bit more like a fairytale, where you meet people along the way during your adventure and the various people and things you collect ultimately come in handy for the big battle at the end.

It's not as whimsical a tale as "Welcome to the Dallergut Dream Department Store," but it does have the same episodic story style, and it's in the same vein of the fairly relaxed, no big stakes stories we've been seeing in translation recently. The "Kamogawa Food Detectives" also comes to mind as a similar story style, and probably "Goodnight Tokyo" and "Before the coffee Gets Cold" although I haven't read either of those two yet.

I agree that the focus audience is probably YA, and the rather broad strokes introduction of Serin and the various characters we see on page is the main reason why I think this would have been well suited to be a graphic novel. We don't go too deep into any of the characters' motivations and nothing generally goes too deep in characterization, but I don't think that was the main goal of the author so I can't quite fault it.

It's a whimsical adventure, a coming of age tale that basically arrives at the conclusion that you alone hold the key to your ultimate happiness, and you alone can improve how it turns out for you. It's just nice and easy going.

Soft, whimsical and not particularly heavily involving

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What a story. It’s amazing what you have and don’t know what you have. Anybody looking for some truth, this is the book for you.

What a story, so short but amazing.

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As I say, the narration was great. My only problems with names. More than half the time the main characters name was pronounced Seddin. When I noticed that sometimes it was being pronounced Heddin I looked up the title description only to find that the name was actually Serin! After awhile, I found it really distracting and difficult to tune out unfortunately. But it’s a great story and the narration is really good quality apart from the confusion with that one name

Narration great BUT…..

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the progress it took get through the story felt like it took really long in the middle of the book

the end Story

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I felt the story was very dry, and didn't flow well at all. I had to go back over some parts, thinking I maybe missed something as the story took a sharp nonsensical turn. But it was the poor writing and not my understanding. It felt like a story aimed at young teens, but I wouldn't even recommend it to my children. I spent at least half of the book expecting the story to improve and unfortunately it didn't.

anticlimactic to say the least

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This book felt like I was reading a children's book. The main character, Serin, was not only younger that I expected her to be, but she acted like she was much, much younger. I also found her very annoying and rather unpleasant. She basically acted like an ungrateful brat all the way through, and yet everyone she met liked her almost immediately. The whole book just felt lacklustre and disappointing.

Not what I was expecting

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