From Publishers Weekly
Isolation pervades Min's haunting debut, a depiction of a tragedy-beset Korean-American family living in upstate New York during the aftermath of the Korean War. As the book opens, Isadora (Isa) Myung Hee Sohn, 18, has just spent 95 days on a pediatric burn unit in Albany, N.Y., following a fire that destroyed her house and killed her parents. The backstory—a swirling, textured and beautifully detailed web of perception that records a divided life—comprises the rest of the novel. Isa's mother is a beauty from a wealthy family in Seoul; her father is a former South Korean soldier, now a rigid science professor. Brother Stephen died in an accident as a toddler; her parents' extreme grief and subsequent neglect leave Isa herself feeling "insubstantial, a transparency that hung like a scrim between them and the child they had lost." The teenage Isa—angst-ridden, disaffected and subject to racial prejudice at school—escapes into the arms of an albino outsider named "Hero" in a sequence that doesn't fit. But when Isa finds out that her mother is having an affair, her ensuing actions destroy her parents' carefully constructed semblance of happily married life. The plot lurches and meanders, but Min's rendering of an outsider family's tight-knit alienation is spot-on.
(Oct.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From School Library Journal
Adult/High School–Isadora Myung Hee Sohn, known as Isa, is caught between two cultures. Her Korean-born parents, who have achieved a measure of success in the United States, disagree on what to call her when she is born. Her mother, an aspiring dancer, wishes to name her after Isadora Duncan. Her father insists that she retain the vestiges of her heritage. She embraces American life, but resists her mother's urgings to get an eyelid operation popular with Asian women. When her younger brother is killed in a freak accident, she struggles with the sense that her traditional parents value their dead son more than their living daughter. Isa falls in love with Hero, an albino boy at her high school, and realizes that she is attracted to him because he, too, is different. He introduces her to sex and convinces her to travel with him to California. But, when Isa suspects her mother of being involved with another man, she finds herself bound by the norms of her culture. In her fury, she determines to reveal the affair, with disastrous results. Only later does Isa understand how everyone is bound by those who precede them. Min poignantly captures the dilemma of second-generation Americans as they try to find a place in their universe, but she also tells of a quest for self-discovery, which is universal.
–Pat Bangs, Fairfax County Public Library, VA Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
