The Second Chance Convenience Store by Kim Ho-yeon, Janet Hong Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: relationship fiction, sad fluff, translated fiction, world literature
Pages: 208
Published by Harper Perennial on June 17, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
In this million-copy international bestseller from Korea, the owner of a corner store takes in an unhoused man who does a good deed, a kind soul whose presence will transform the whole neighborhood—a heartwarming tale of community and redemption reminiscent of the bestselling novels of Matt Haig and Gabrielle Zevin.
Dok-go lives in Seoul Station. He can’t remember his past, and the only thing he knows for certain is that he could really use a drink. When he finds a lost wallet filled with documents, his life is drastically changed.
Mrs. Yeom, a retired history teacher and current owner of her neighborhood’s corner store, is distraught over the loss of her purse, until she receives a mysterious call from the person who found it. To thank this down-on-his-luck stranger, she offers him a free meal from the convenience store. Seeing the joy the food brings him, Mrs. Yeom impulsively invites him to stop by for lunch every day.
In a twist of fate, Dok-go saves the store from a robber—a brave act that propels Mrs. Yeom to offers the bear-like man a job working the night shift, despite the objections of her wary employees. The store’s new employee quickly wins over the quirky denizens of the neighborhood, becoming a welcoming ear and source of advice for his coworkers and neighbors’ problems, and helping his new boss save the store from financial ruin. But just when things are looking up for Dok-go, Mrs. Yeom's good-for-nothing son, eager to sell the store, hires a detective to dig into the mysterious man’s past and what he seems to be trying so hard to forget.
The Second Chance Convenience Store is a moving and joyful story of a woman fighting for her community and a man who has lost everything except the will to try again.
My Review:
There are a whole series, actually series-es, that are very similar to this one, often translated from either Korean or Japanese. Generally, they are feel good stories about small acts of kindness and building community, set around an unlikely or out of the way place that manifests just for people who need it.
Some of those stories, like The Dallergut Dream Department Store and What You Are Looking For Is In the Library, are, in some way, just a bit magical. Or even more than a bit. In other stories, including this one as well as my personal favorites, The Kamogawa Food Detectives and Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, there’s no actual magic.
Well, there IS a kind of magic, but it’s the magic of chance meetings, open hearts and human connections. The settings are entirely realistic and even downright mundane, without the influence of even the smallest touch of a magical being like The Curious Kitten At the Chibineko Kitchen.
We don’t generally think of convenience stores as remotely magical at all. And the Always Convenient convenience store in the Cheongpa-dong neighborhood in Seoul certainly isn’t magical. From the perspective of many of the customers, it’s generally not all that convenient.
But it is Mrs. Yeom’s way of providing for herself in her retirement, keeping herself busy and mentally engaged, AND giving decent jobs to a few people in the neighborhood who really, really need a hand up in one way or another – even if it’s just a place to complain every day.
Mrs. Yeom is a retired teacher, and it seems like she still has a few things to teach, not just to the people in her neighborhood, but to her staff and even to her self-centered, self-absorbed, adult son.
And one member of her community has a lesson to teach her.
Her staff are often people she rescues, in one way or another. Mrs. Oh needs a job – and needs a place to get away from home so she can complain about home. Sihyeon is studying for her civil service exams and needs a relatively mindless job that lets her study when it’s not busy. Seongpil works the graveyard shift to take care of his family. Mrs. Yeom doesn’t expect them to stay, she recognizes that her little shop is a stepping stone for each of them – or that it should be.
But it’s Mrs. Yeom’s decision to reach out a helping hand to Dokgo, one of the homeless alcoholics inhabiting the Seoul train station, that proves to be the saving of her store, her retirement and her relationship with her estranged son.
A helping hand that Dokgo pays forward, back and all around, as the refuge of her little store provides him with a place to come back to himself, so he can go back to being, not who he used to be, but the better man he once drowned in alcohol and regret.
Escape Rating B: Encapsulating this story is hard, partly because it’s such a gentle story, and partly because not a lot happens in the sense of any kind of adventure or crisis. All of the books of this type are feel good stories, even though the good vibes the reader leaves the story with are often the result of a lot of sad fluff between the actual pages.
So when I pick up one of these books, I come into it looking for a particular sort of story. These are my comfort reads when I’m not in the mood for a murder mystery. When I pick up a comfort read I’m looking for catharsis, and these stories deliver a different kind than the triumph of justice.
This is the kind of story I pick up when I’m looking for reassurance that the world can be better in small ways if not large ones, and that individual humans can do good in the world, even if in the aggregate humans can be, well, terribly human and terrible with it.
I picked this particular book up right now as an antidote to the book I’m listening to, a book which has turned out to be a hate read/listen because ALL the characters are unlikeable. At the Second Chance Convenience Store, I hoped that each of the characters would be likable albeit more than a bit quirky or eccentric or outright troubled or all of the above. It’s what I needed and it’s what I received.
From one perspective, this particular book is held together with Mrs. Yeom’s kindness. She holds out a helping hand to those around her, does the right thing, provides a place for those who need it and gathers a bit of found family around her to keep her going in her retirement. She’s not looking for thanks or rewards or kudos – she’s looking for connections and that’s exactly what she gets.
OTOH, this is very much Dokgo’s story. Mrs. Yeom gives him a hand up, not a handout, and he takes it. She’s not specifically a do-gooder, she doesn’t lecture or sermonize, she just gives him time and space and opportunity to find himself again. And as he does he also follows her example, performing random acts of kindness and just plain listening that give him every bit as much as he gives to others.
The whole thing was just delightful without being saccharine, as these stories usually are. What made this one just a bit different is that it combined Dokgo’s journey with the pandemic, while a lot of stories skip over that time period as an aberration. This one uses it to full effect as part of Dokgo’s redemption in a way that was unexpected but made for a perfect ending.
