Jan Book Club: Marigold Mind Laundry

January Book Club Pick - review

As you can imagine I was very excited to hit the ground running with our very first pick Marigold Mind Laundry. By all accounts, it was sounding promising!

For those unfamiliar here is the full synopsis:

Overnight, in the village of Marigold on top of a hill, old Jieun has conjured up a magical Mind Laundry, where she cleanses painful experiences from her customer’s hearts, transferring them into stains on a T-shirt and transforming them into dazzling red petals.

We meet five of Jieun’s customers to her laundry: a frustrated young filmmaker; a tortured social-media influencer; a distraught mother who has discovered her husband’s other family; a young woman two-timed by her lover, and Yeonghui, a victim of bullying, who works as a delivery man to escape his pain in routine.

After washing away their pain and ironing out their creases, Jieun discovers an astonishing revelation about memory, pain and moving on.

As we laugh, wonder and grow with the vivid characters in this book, MARIGOLD MIND LAUNDRY shows how we too can tap into the positivity and magic that lies in us all.

Which bad memories would you like to wash away?

For me; this fell short and although I finished it, it was an absolute slog. The prose felt surface level, repetitive and the characters were under developed meaning they all kinda merged into one leaving me confused at times.

I found the translation clunky in parts and although I appreciated the themes about regret and life I WANTED MORE!!!!!! I wanted more circling back to see how the characters felt after washing away the bad memories. But hey it’s a stunning book cover design that I will always have a soft spot for cuz it’s pretty AND it was the springboard for our little book besties community 😍

2.5/5 ⭐️ from me.

You can purchase a copy of Marigold Mind Laundry here