What a viewIn Netflix K-drama Romance is a Bonus Book, would-be lovers maintain a teasing tension
- Starring Lee Jong-suk and Lee Na-young, the character-driven series follows a downtrodden single mother and her childhood friend
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There can’t be many delicate tragicomedies containing a perfectly gauged scene-within-a-scene of a fight in the rain between a downtrodden, homeless, hopeless, shoeless mother and a lecherous drunk that’s illuminated by the lines: “You sh*t-faced a**hole on crack!” from her; and a pitiable, “I want to be loved, too,” from him, as he staggers away, defeated.
Netflix Korean drama Romance is a Bonus Book doesn’t pop with crackers like that at every turn of its somewhat overstretched 16-part first series, but it does maintain a teasing tension between would-be lovers Cha Eun-ho (played by Lee Jong-suk, last seen in historical romance Hymn of Death ) and Kang Dan-yi (Lee Na-young).
Friends since childhood, their prickly relationship is ready to have the inevitable fires of love lit underneath it. But their circumstances are mismatched: Eun-ho (not the drunk in the street fight) is a famous author, teacher and book editor; Dan-yi (the woman in the street fight) is an out-of-work single mother and divorcee with a bankrupt, cheating ex-husband. To make matters worse, she is squatting in her condemned ex-home – which begins to be demolished around her one morning.
Can a character-driven, boy-girl love story be told these days without a sexual-politics dimension? Would such a story be interesting anyway? Whatever the answer, the viewer can only cheer for downcast Dan-yi, who married the wrong man and lost everything, and who is insulted and scorned at each increasingly futile job interview.
So, demeaningly, she works secretly as the frosty Eun-ho’s housekeeper, eats his food and uses his computer: true love in the making. Defiant Dan-yi, however, won’t be satisfied until she has a career of her own and doesn’t have to play Cinderella – even if (cheese alert!) a stranger does slip onto her feet her lost shoes. Girl, interrupted; but back in the ring and ready for battle.