From a story on lithub.com by Mirinae Lee headlined “Learning How to Write About War”:

To have your work compared to a monumental literary title is always an honor and a burden to a writer. My debut novel, 8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster is often described as a historical novel similar to Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko. Like Pachinko, my novel is a story of a Korean family surviving the turbulence of the 20th century, the most dramatic period of modern Korean history. But some of the early readers of my novel, especially those who read it mainly with Pachinko in mind, voiced a complaint that 8 Lives is at times too dark and too devastating to read.