Very few books get translated into English. If something does get translated, one can assume it’s among the best a culture has created. The novel Petty Lies by the South Korean author Sulmi Bak is a surprising choice for a translated novel unless there’s truly nothing better coming out of South Korea than this semi-childish effort at creating a psychological thriller.
The structure of Petty Lies is badly thought-out. The big reveal at the end is fumbled. The motivations are flimsy, the dialogues are infantile, and the most interesting thing about the plot is the characters’ obsession with test scores. These are people who are really really into text scores. The test scores are so important that they also become characters. Especially since the actual characters are boring.
There’s always a chance that the translator is incompetent and made the author sound like a moron. But even assuming that the translator here is an absolute hack, the novel is still painfully weak.