Customer Reviews

Secondhand World

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With a writing style that manages to be both spare and lyrical, Katherine Min creates a completely believable 1970s world in which, Isa, her Korean-American teenage protagonist, struggles with issues of identity, isolation, first love and sexuality, in the context of a family that has already been torn apart by great loss. In short, exquisitely drawn chapters, each character, even minor ones, become so real in their flawed humanity that they are all missed when the book is over. The relationship between Isa and her emotionally distant father is particularly complex, compelling and ultimately heartbreaking. The climax of the book, while startling feels absolutely right and its subsequent unfolding reveals great depth of insight and emotional truth. This is a remarkable debut novel and Katherine Min is definitely a writer to watch.

Secondhand World opens with a quote from the Orpheus Variations: "Of all the tricks of memory, the cruelest / Is accuracy." This sentiment is, I believe, the key to appreciating the savage beauty of this novel. The world that Isadora Myung Hee Sohn inhabits during her senior year in high school pulsates with an energy that is just beyond our capacity to understand. The minutiae of what is seen and felt every day becomes ominous not because of what happens, but because of what is observed.

There is no sepia-toned sentimentality. Isa's sloppy sexual awakening, her righteousness about her parents' flaws, the distance that grows between her and her closest friends from sharing too great a level of intimacy---the narrator bridges the gaps in our selective memories, reminding us of how painful and wondrous life at that age truly is.

The seemingly simple, layered narrative; the fires that bookend the pregnant silences in Isa's household; the irreversible consequences of being human----a person could reflect endlessly on the images, the language, and the emotional depth of this novel. How is it that we survivors (all of us) can fail to see or fail to understand even those closest to us? How can the fleeting and mundane make life sublime? This is not a plot-driven novel, yet it is almost impossible to put down.

Seattle was recently pummeled by 70 mph winds that brought down trees and power lines. Our lights went out at midnight, when I still had twenty pages left to go. I scrambled around for the flashlight so that I could finish the novel, ignoring the howling wind, the flapping of a neighbor's roof, and a passing emergency vehicle until I was done. Then I lay awake thinking not about the dipping temperature but about the story.

Secondhand World is a remarkable novel. I highly recommend it.

I finished this book in one day because I was too fascinated to put it down. Its plot is unpredictable and improbable but utterly convincing, due to an unforgettable ensemble of lovable and nuanced characters. Isa is an engaging and interesting heroine, both unique and easy to relate to. The writing is fluid and accessible, the themes explored universal and provocative. I can't believe this is a first novel. It has a permanent home on my "favorite book" shelf and I'm already eager for Min's next work.

Read it for the flawless sentences or the unexpected turns: a coming-of-age novel in which loss is more than the vanity of innocence, a familial and cultural clash whose darker side inexorably turns into the light and the reader's full view, a first-person point-of-view that conveys the stuff of a world as well as an individual consciousness, a look at how American life is so richly imagined and so blankly played out, including wonderful coming-of-sexual age road trip that combines Henry Millerian exuberance with Nabokovian irony. The four main characters - the teenage Korean-American heroine, her immigrant parents, and her not-quite-blind boyfriend - deepen and come more alive on the page the more pages you turn. This is a deftly put-together novel that makes good on its promise and then some.

Since Salinger -- er, make that since Richardson, maybe -- the woods have been full of precociously perceptive young narrators, enduring the ordinary and extraordinary troubles of adolescence at a time when their capacity for articulation is outpacing their understanding of human character. Creating a distinctive and original voice for a teenage protagonist is fiendishly difficult, even for seasoned novelists. Newcomer Katherine Min has taken on that challenge and succeeded spectacularly.

Isa Myung Hee Sohn is alert, troubled, funny, realistic, shrewd, headstrong, confused, generous, capable of outrage, and capable of change: in short, she's a believable and likable young woman, and the reader finishes her story hoping strongly to encounter her again. The fearsome burdens she inherits, both inside and outside her unique family, would have turned a less thoughtfully imagined character into a cartoon (perhaps a tool for polemic, perhaps a cookie-cutter moper or avenger). Instead, Min shows the patience, craft, and wisdom to build her into a human being, complex and usually admirable. Highly recommended.

Secondhand World is a novel you will read quickly, but long remember. The short chapters, the intriguing plot, and Katherine Min's lyrical language, will pull you along. You'll find yourself caring deeply for Isa Sohn, the narrator/protagonist, whose story, though dark and tragic, is surprisingly uplifting. The specifics of Isa's plight drive the story: as a first generation Korean-American, she is caught between two cultures; she believes she can never fill the void in her parents' lives left by her brother's tragic death; there are family secrets she must learn. But it is the universality of her struggle that elevates this novel to the unforgettable level. This is ultimately a story of the fundamental task of late adolescence: Isa must discover self, and like the rest of us, she can't fully do that until she discovers and accepts her parents' selves.

I love this book! The author has written a story that is at times funny, at times sad, and in the end hopeful. The main character Isa is a Korean-American girl growing up in New York state in the 1970's. Isa feels alone, separated by her own self, which she feels is different from everyone else, and by her parents' foreignness. Isa becomes friends with a classmate named Rachel and with Rachel's family and gets insight into how this family lives and how different this family's life is from her own family life. Isa also has a boyfriend Hero and learns more about herself and her sexuality from this relationship. The author has put a lot of thought into how judgmental we can be when we are young and lacking in experience of the world. Isa is judgmental, especially of her parents and what is right and wrong, and some of her judgments set into motion actions and events which end up destroying her family and putting her own life in danger. This is a wonderful book, and I hope you will read it. You won't be disappointed!

Katherine Min has crafted a hauntingly unique portrait of grief, shame, sensuality and the power of a family's past in her first novel about a Korean American girl coming of age, a sharp-edged girl who is lashing out at everything she knows and thinks she knows. Isa represents a new, forceful character in America's fiction scene-a first generation Asian girl, neither favored son nor understood daughter, struggling with the forces of her sexual power and disastrous desire to expose hidden truths. Read this book for the beauty of the language, alone.

Seeing the world through the narrator's Korean-American eyes made "normal" suburbia new. I enjoyed the sense of experiencing various teenage challenges and adventures with the narrator, such as dealing with demanding parents, working up friendships, and establishing an identity. I highly recommend this mesmerizing read, which is both unique and universal.

From the first page the reader knows that Isa's parents have been killed in a house fire that left her badly burned. But how did the fire start and why? The answer turns out to be much tricker than you'd think. I was completely surprised by the ending, but then it seemed just right. Isa goes through a rebellion, like most adolescents, and it's her anger at her parents and her feeling of being an outsider at school that sets off acts of betrayal, jealousy, and finally violence. Isa was a great character but it's her parents who emerge as heroic in their struggle to escape history and make a new life for themselves in this country. I loved this book! Highly recommended.