Using java and GSON, I want to deserialize my POJO class

@Data
public class Book {
    
    @SerializedName("id")
    private String id;
    
    @SerializedName("tags")
    private List<String> tags;

}

gson.fromJson(userRecordString, Book.class)

from a mailformed JSON, which I receive from the Kinesis stream:

{
    "id": "B09W1W4D2F",
    "tags": "[TAG_1,TAG_2]"
}

The problem here is I receive "[TAG_1,TAG_2]" with quotes, so JSON threats it as a String, not as an array. It should be "tags": ["TAG_1","TAG_2"] instead.

I’m assuming I need to write a custom deserealizer, but all the solutions I found are based on creating a new class for private List. I don’t want to do it.

I want to:

1. store my deserialized values in List<String> tags
2. preferably deserialize other fields using default serialization, so I don’t want to deserialize the whole class manually.

Is there any solution to this?