ShelfLook
Tools About
Cover of Ten Thousand Sorrows

How long does it take to read Ten Thousand Sorrows?

Elizabeth Kim

Ten Thousand Sorrows by Elizabeth Kim takes about 4 hours 42 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 4 hours 42 minutes

A weekend read

First published 2000. 256 pages, about 70,400 words.

10 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 7 hours 49 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 4 hours 42 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 2 hours 56 minutes

The page count is the median across 7 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

"They called it an "honor killing," but to Elizabeth Kim, the night she watched her grandfather and uncle hang her mother from the wooden rafter in the corner of their small Korean hut, it was cold-blooded murder. Her Omma had committed the sin of lying with an American soldier, and producing not just a bastard but a honhyol - a mixed-race child, considered worth less than nothing.". "Left at a Christian orphanage in postwar Seoul like garbage, bleeding and terrified, Kim unwittingly embarked on the next phase of her life when she was adopted by a childless Fundamentalist pastor and his wife in the United States. Unfamiliar with Western customs and language, but terrified that she would be sent back to the orphanage, or even killed, Kim trained herself to be the perfect child. But just as her Western features doomed her in Korea, so her Asian features served as a constant reminder that she wasn't good enough for her new, all-white environment." "After escaping her adoptive parents' home, only to find herself in an abusive and controlling marriage, Kim finally made a break for herself by having a daughter and running away with her to a safer haven - something Omma could not do for her."--BOOK JACKET.

Subjects: Korean American women, Korea, Racially mixed children, Racially mixed people, Orphans, Korean Americans

Books like this

Popular books of similar length