American Hagwon by Min Jin Lee review – a gloriously immersive follow-up to Pachinko

A Korean family is willing to sacrifice everything for their children’s education, in the third book in Lee’s Diaspora Quartet

“An excellent hagwon,” according to one of the characters in Min Jin Lee’s new novel, “is everything.” Every year, Korean parents pay hefty sums to send their children to these private after-school academies designed to turbocharge academic performance, where they spend evenings and weekends being drilled in mathematics, reasoning and essay technique. In the third book in what she has called her Diaspora Quartet – a follow-up to 2017’s Pachinko, recently named one of the New York Times’s top 100 books of the 21st century – she presents the fierce competition to snag a spot at those hagwons deemed the best as symptomatic of Korea’s scarcity mindset: in a country…