Customer Reviews

The Queens of K-town

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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.

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.

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.

In her debut novel, The Queens of K-Town, Angela Hur beautifully portrays the decadent subculture of Manhattan's 32nd Street, a shadowy place where expensively dressed mafia, room salon hostesses of dubious immigration status, and Ivy League-educated investment bankers commingle and coparticipate in nightly rituals of casual self-destruction. It's within this setting that the protagonist Cora Moon, a high school student newly relocated from California, discovers a set of friends who bond through a brutal act of violence, fitting for a set of characters who seem to be able to show love only by causing pain to one another.

What began in violence ends in violence, as their friendship is torn apart by a chain of events that culminates in her best friend's leap from a K-town skyscraper. The novel proceeds in nonlinear fashion, and we only gradually learn both whether the adult Cora can avoid the same bone-crunching fate and how she came to be broken on the inside.

What sets apart Cora Moon from the usual Ophelia is her upbeat sense of humor and unconventional curiosity. Why is an Asian female suicide a cultural indictment, she wonders, when a Caucasian female suicide is simply a senseless tragedy? She tries to make sense of her friend's suicide, her mother's physical abandonment, and her father's emotional exile through study of traditional shaman communications with the dead and Korean historical legends of mass virgin suicides. Teaching herself quantum gravity, she finds parallels in the curious asymmetry of matter and antimatter and the absences in her own life, and wonders about the geometry of space and death. Her conversations with the "monk" and her sister often become comic performances, with her foils setting up her own punchlines, sometimes more literally than not.

Through Cora's narrative, we also glimpse into lives that could have been fulfilled in parallel universes: private jokes about her mother's former lover that hit too close to the truth, empty notebooks of a poet who gave up poetry, as well as a glimmer of hope in the gentle fatherly love shown by another friend's non-Korean stepfather, or the maternal concern displayed by the Vietnamese doctor at the STD clinic. Though these alternative threads never fully develop, they shed light on Cora's own coming-of-age and her process of self-discovery.

This novel is a treasure, a virtuoso performance with hidden gems on almost every page. Ms. Hur is a rising star among the pantheon of young women writers, gifted with a hyperactive imagination and a voice of fierce originality. Until her next work, I'll be a looking up to the rooftops while wandering Manhattan, wondering what other stories lay hidden above.

Hur, with disciplined finesse, catalogs the messiness of relationships, made messier by love, loss, drink, drugs, sex, identity-crises, depression, and of course, physics. Despite all the talk of suicide, Hur's Cora has the gift of wit. A dour wit that will liven any cynical and over-educated, but all broken-up inside, twenty-to-thirty-something's lonely Friday night. The double narrative simultaneously tracks Cora's coming of age, and coming apart -- a life once crammed with people turned into a life of self-exile. Queen's of K Town is filled with darkly funny and surprisingly touching vignettes that often toggle between hyper-realism and the absurd. (Cora plays "doctor" with her lust interest; she reclines on a couch while he pretends to be her shrink. Ha!) The dry, poignant laughs never stop.

Cora Moon narrates her return to New York's Koreatown after an absence of 10 years, drawn back by a personal history that insists on a conclusion. Concurrently, her younger self experiences an exhilarating and exhausting passage out of her childhood home and into an unkind adult world. The two narratives chase each other through the book - physics is a major metaphor throughout, and this structure mirrors the double helix - each racing through pages of intense and dreamlike prose towards the signal events that bookend Cora's emergence into adulthood.

This book is Angela Hur's first novel, and she's clearly been through intense and heavy experiences. However, despite the honest and sometimes heartbreaking account of loss (of innocence, of family, of extremely elegant stationery), the book finds a lot of humor, and not always dark, in the alleys and apartments of K-Town. Combining sparkling writing, an infatuation with quantum physics and more than a hint of Korean national myth, the Queens of K-Town links a Virgin Suicides style look at the sadness of young womanhood with the style and mystery of Murakami at his best.

So says the little boy in the stationery store as Cora explains outerspace physics to him. KID...I AGREE!

I read the reviews on the back cover and I was sold. A NEW VOICE! FRESH! Never judge a book by its cover. This story of a Korean-American in Korea Town, Manhattan just didn't grab me or make me care about the story or the characters. I don't think it was a difference of cultures that was causing this disconnect for me, I think it was the over-wordiness of the author; the coldness of her characters; the nonsense dialogue; the entire book. I felt like I was reading one of those over-stylized Calvin Klein commercials.

At least it provided me with a goal...to finish the book so I could warn others about it.

I wanted to like this book, which is why I bought it. The characters are shallow and completely without depth. I had utterly no empathy for the protagonist and the story was pretentious at best. I thought her thoughts and decisions were silly and juvenile, and at the end, I just wanted her to jump. The book was a failure for me. There were some nice poetic lines, but in terms of a story, it did not hold my interest. I can't fathom the rave reviews, because this book was a minus in entertainment and intelligence. The protagonist was an unbelievable character, and I could not understand her immense feeling for another character that she barely knew. I didn't care about her, and the end was a complete letdown. Again, along w/ Annie Walters's Glimmer and Ann-Marie MacDonald's Fall On Your Knees, the pages should cringe in embarrassment for containing such banality.

This poetically written, searing novel about the pangs of adolescence and post-adolescence is a tremendous debut by a writer with a bright future. Funny, touching, and smart, "The Queens of K-Town" will stay with readers for a long time.