Review: American Hagwon Earns Every One of Its 600 Pages

Review. Nine years is a long time to wait for a novel, and American Hagwon knows it. Min Jin Lee’s previous book, Pachinko (2017), was a finalist for the National Book Award and turned into the kind of success that follows a writer into every room. Her new novel, published by Cardinal on 29 September 2026, is the third in a planned four-novel series about the Korean diaspora, and it was, as NPR’s reviewer put it, “nearly 10 years in the making.” It is also more than 600 pages long. Both facts are on every page — the patience and the size. Information verified through 19 October 2026.

The bet the Kohs place

When the novel opens, John and Helen Koh have just brought their three children — Bo, DH and Mido, all born in Paramus, New Jersey — back to Seoul after six years in Sydney, where John was a senior manager for a Korean conglomerate. The years the book covers, 1992 to 2007, then take that comfortable life apart in two blows: a betrayal by John’s oldest friend and superior, who orders him to engineer the firing of a young employee and leaves him holding the consequences, and the 1997 Asian financial crisis. The family lands in Southern California. John, the former executive, works in the kitchen of a fish restaurant in a Korean shopping mall.

What the Kohs refuse to surrender is the bet itself: education will carry the next generation somewhere safer. The title names the instrument. A hagwon is a private after-school academy, the kind that drills students for examinations and, ideally, the Ivy League. All three Koh children end up working in one — inside the machine their parents’ faith was outsourced to. That design, children employed by the very system meant to rescue them, is what lifts the book above the ordinary immigrant saga. The dream doesn’t just get tested. It gets a job.

Exposition, and unapologetic about it

Lee tells rather than shows, constantly, and the telling has divided reviewers in an instructive way. Publishers Weekly found her “exposition-heavy style feels a bit flat compared to her previous novel,” while NPR’s critic argued the opposite: there is “plenty of exposition in this novel and, yet, not a page is workmanlike,” and Lee “conjures epiphanies out of the simplest material.” My own judgement sides with NPR, for a reason the New York Times review, quoted at Book Marks, accidentally nails: the novel is “deeply researched and replete with details of bills, contracts, deals, salaries, settlements, wills and arrangements” — possibly “the first epic novel of estate planning.” Read that as praise and it’s exact. This is a book about accumulation: of tuition fees, shift hours, small generosities, debts of every kind. A leaner style would be a lie about how these lives are actually lived. The ledger is the form.

The honest caveat is pace. BookBrowse’s reviewer warns that the novel “moves slowly, and every one of its 640 pages is felt,” though the same review calls it “the sort of book that rewards patience.” Both halves are true. The first stretch introduces a large cast at a deliberate walk. Readers who need a plot to grip them by the collar should know what they’re picking up.

A gymnasium, five hundred parents

Late in the book comes the scene critics keep circling. The hagwon where the Koh children work is run by an idealistic Korean American nicknamed Lion, who believes education should change people rather than merely sort them. Addressing a gymnasium packed with some five hundred Korean parents, he argues, in NPR’s summary, that education should be “transformative, not just transactional” — a passage NPR’s reviewer says should be read by “anyone called upon to defend a liberal arts education.” A thesis speech like that sinks most novels. Here it lands, because Lee has spent hundreds of pages showing the transactional world in granular detail first: the fees, the rankings, the fear. By the time Lion stands up, the argument has been earned the hard way, the way the Kohs earn everything.

The verdict from the cheap seats and the expensive ones

The trade reception has been close to a coronation. Booklist, Kirkus and Library Journal all gave starred reviews — Booklist called it an “immersive masterpiece,” Kirkus praised its “masterfully controlled storytelling” and concluded, “What makes a good life? The author’s wisdom is a gift to her readers.” The Boston Globe, via Book Marks, called it “well worth the wait.” Matthew Desmond, the author of Evicted, judged it “among the very best novels of immigration.” NPR’s critic went furthest: “I didn’t think Pachinko could be topped. Then I read American Hagwon.”

So: clear a week, maybe two, and read it this autumn. Not because it’s flawless — the middle sags under its own thoroughness now and then — but because it’s the rare big novel whose bigness is the meaning. Lee keeps asking what a family owes its children and what children owe back, and she refuses every easy answer the question attracts. Kirkus framed the book’s inquiry as “What makes a good life?” Six hundred pages in, the Kohs are still arguing about it. You will be too, and that’s the recommendation.

Sources

• NPR review, syndicated at KVCR — “I didn’t think ‘Pachinko’ could be topped. Then I read ‘American Hagwon'” (28 Sept. 2026; plot, 1992–2007 span, the hagwon and Lion’s gymnasium speech, Lee’s exposition, nearly ten years in the making): https://kvcr.org/news/npr-top-stories/2026-09-28/american-hagwon-min-jin-lee-review
• Hachette Book Group / Cardinal — American Hagwon product page (publisher, on-sale date of 29 Sept. 2026, hardcover edition, publisher’s synopsis, starred-review and author endorsements incl. Matthew Desmond): https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/min-jin-lee/american-hagwon/9781549156397/?lens=cardinal
• BookBrowse — American Hagwon: summary and media reviews (Booklist, Kirkus and Library Journal starred reviews; Publishers Weekly’s cooler notice; BookBrowse’s own review on pace and its 640 pages): https://www.bookbrowse.com/reviews/index.cfm/book_number/5301/american-hagwon
• Book Marks — reviews of American Hagwon (New York Times review excerpt on the novel’s researched detail; Boston Globe review excerpt): https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/american-hagwon/

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