Review by Booklist Review
Poet and memoirist Koh's elegant debut novel combines elements from her two previous titles--lyrical, spare language intertwined with multigenerational experiences. Opening in an antagonistically divided Korea suffering violent civil unrest and military abuses, Koh introduces progenitor Yohan, whose end proves unjust. His daughter Insuk marries Sungho, who leaves Korea shortly thereafter. Insuk and Sungho's mother join him in California to face the challenges of being immigrants. The couple's only son comes home and expands the family. Through the decades, their tenuous connections to Korea never break. Koh divides her narrative into sections generally corresponding to the decades between 1982 and 2014. She titles each chapter with a character's name and year; with shuffling points of view, the resulting format resembles interlinked stories. At the book's center, Koh places a sole chapter that bears a ship's name and one year out of chronological order, 1945, brilliantly and slyly suggesting that a single decision in that pivotal year could have changed the progression of everything that came after. Koh produces another intricately accomplished, intimate melding of history and storytelling.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The moving and lyrical debut novel from memoirist Koh (The Magical Language of Others) follows an unhappy South Korean couple who emigrates to the U.S. In the wake of the military government's violent 1980 crackdown on protestors, Insuk is arranged to be married to Sungho by her father, Yohan, on advice he believes he's received from the spirit of Insuk's late mother, who died when Insuk was little. By the time Insuk becomes pregnant in 1983, Sungho has begun cheating on her. Unnerved by the rampant kidnapping and torture perpetrated by the military dictatorship and low on options, the couple moves to San Jose, Calif., where their son, Henry, is born. When Henry is five, Sungho takes him to the Chinese Korean restaurant where she waits tables. In Henry's view, the husband-and-wife team who run the restaurant lord over their staff "like a boa constrictor." After Insuk has a miscarriage, she begins an affair with a man named Robert, stirred by his commitment to Korean reunification. Koh weaves together the narrative in short, bracing chapters from various characters' perspectives both in the U.S. and back in Korea. A tragic, Kafkaesque episode involving Yohan is told from a Korean prison guard's point of view, and it gives greater weight to the story's intergenerational trauma, familial grief, and political consciousness. Koh has fully harnessed her potential in this assured outing. Agent: Kate McKean, Howard Morhaim Literary Agency. (Nov.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
DEBUT Award-winning poet and memoirist Koh (The Magical Language of Others) makes her fiction debut with a story about a young couple in their early 20s, Sungho and Insuk, who are in an arranged marriage and emigrate from South Korea to San Jose, California, in the 1980s. Their story continues through 2014 with tales of Insuk's life as a working mother, the growing dissension between her and her mother-in-law, and the struggles in her marriage. Koh also adds the voice of the couple's son Henry to the mix and details his experiences. The novel looks at assimilation in a new country and advancement in life and society and touches upon the politics of thought between North and South Koreans. Readers who find satisfaction in deep and emotionally drawn characterizations and storylines will not find it here. Instead, they will savor a richly multilayered tale presenting snippets of the lives and stories behind these characters while simultaneously exploring immigrant and Asian American experiences. VERDICT Koh's work should resonate strongly, with its focus on the desire of wanting to be seen and to belong, regardless of the histories that shape the individual.--Shirley Quan
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A multigenerational novel centered on a Korean woman who flees the South Korean dictatorship and immigrates to California in 1983. The novel opens with a death and a marriage. Soon after her father is killed under the military dictatorship in South Korea, Insuk marries Sungho, a boy in her year at school. Sungho moves to San Jose not long after, leaving Insuk--now pregnant with a boy, Henry--behind with his difficult mother, Huran. A year later, Sungho sends for Insuk and Huran, and the whole family relocates to California. Insuk struggles with a difficult transition and befriends Robert, a Korean activist advocating for the reunification of North and South Korea. Snatches of conversation and throwback segments strewn throughout the novel impart snippets of modern Korean history, including the 1945 sinking of the Ukishima Maru, a passenger ship that exploded during a trip that was supposed to repatriate thousands of Koreans from Japan at the end of World War II; the 1980 Gwangju Massacre, which followed widespread protests after the South Korean general Chun Doo-hwan assumed power and imposed martial law and the 1988 Seoul Olympics, when doves symbolically released for peace were burned alive by the Olympic cauldron. As the novel unfolds, the reader encounters various stakeholders' perspectives conveying what it felt like to live through these events. Quiet attention is paid throughout to the role of American imperialism in modern Korean history and the violence it has wreaked, but the novel's pedagogical elements never tip it into didacticism. Koh's poetic prose delights with surprising metaphors and a cast of skillfully rendered characters. A mesmerizing, delicately crafted novel about survival in the wake of civil war and transpacific imperialism. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
