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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"I've heard the sound a body makes after it's leapt off a twenty-story building.", September 9, 2007
Looking back over her short life of twenty-six years, Cora Moon is irresistibly attracted to suicide, having spent the last ten years sublimating the tragic death of a friend who jumped from the roof of an apartment building. Steeped in her parents' cultural past in Korea and her own generation's complex adjustments to a country in which she forever remains "other", Cora Moon has fallen in love, finally, with her own projected destiny. Pursuing a torrid, impetuous affair with a man in the building where she is staying, Cora Moon prepares psychologically for the appointed day, meanwhile making peace with the short history that has defined her inability to leave the past behind.
Gradually the story is revealed: Cora Moon's former life in California; her mother's "desertion" of a family to tend an ailing parent in Korea; the confusion of a sixteen-year-old daughter with an unassertive father and younger sister far wiser than her years; and the Queens of K-Town, the three friends she clings to during the troubling summer when her friend plunges to her death. The friends are a fait accompli once Cora Moon has fallen under the spell of the enigmatic Bev, the putative leader of the group that nightly makes the rounds of clubs in Korea Town, not far from Manhattan. Quickly accepted by Mina and Soo Young, Cora Moon forms the fourth of the obstreperous quartet, a wild group that parties as if there is no tomorrow.
Their night life soon catches up with the disaffected girls, Cora Moon the most vulnerable because of her age and circumstances. Her tangential ties to these young women based on a mutual need for direction and identity, the protagonist personifies the cultural divide that sets Cora Moon apart from her non-Asian contemporaries. This brief surge of heady power quenched by the morning-after consequences of the friends' impulsive behavior, the girl who sorely misses her mother finds herself coping with a reality too overwhelming to process at her tender age.
Edgy and provocative, the author captures the essence of place and time, a young woman's search for identity run aground by tragedy, the following years infected by the need to resolve the death of a companion and her own participation in the drama that unfolds. Riddled with teen-aged angst and the natural rebelliousness of adolescence, Cora Moon straddles the past and the present, unable to come to terms with either until she relives the events that have consumed her life. Brave, cocky and determined, Cora Moon is sympathetic and endearing, her emotional turmoil the greatest obstacle to a more fulfilling future. Luan Gaines/ 2007.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A beautiful opening novel, September 28, 2007
In this wonderful debut novel, Hur weaves a richly detailed account of an afflicted character within a non-linear narrative. Each Chapter plays beautifully into the next as we follow Cora as a troubled youngster and a depressive, yet resolute, young woman.
Hur explores how it feels to be trapped, for years, within an event. The voice that emerges from this young author's exploration is sentimental and engaging. There is plenty for all to appreciate in this humorous, intelligent, and profound opening novel.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant, November 26, 2007
I was so enraptured by the prose, narrative, and characters that I read the book all at once. Born, bred, and living at the intersection of multiple cultures and countries, there was much I could identify with and react to. I completely disagree with the two reviews above - the prose was mesmerizing, the unfolding structure of the narrative kept me completely in its grip, and the label of "murky philosophizing about the meaning of being bicultural, bilingual, and bisexual" reveals more about the reviewer's lack of experience in grappling with these issues than with the novel itself.
Angela Hur clearly possesses a gift for writing and an intellect that gives her room to have fun (turn of phrase, details and observation) even while channeling intense and complex emotions onto the page. Anybody looking for the budding next generation of Asian American literature need look no further. I hope she continues to write and carve a new path into a genre littered with well-worn narratives and tired characters.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beautifully Tragic. Bleakly Hilarious.
Hur, with disciplined finesse, catalogs the messiness of relationships, made messier by love, loss, drink, drugs, sex, identity-crises, depression, and of course, physics.
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Published on April 21, 2008 by Jesse P. Mank
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