An earnest but dour debut.
A former Korean film star reunites with her three adult children just as their lives begin to implode.
At the height of her fame, Soong Nan was Korea’s Elizabeth Taylor, but she harbors a secret that could topple her fame: She is the daughter of a comfort woman and an occupying Japanese soldier. When she is 14, she walks 100 miles south to Seoul, where she hopes no one will guess her Japanese heritage. Once there, she steals a handful of grapes from a fruit vendor, who chases her into the street, where she is hit by a limousine. The car’s occupant, renowned movie producer Park Dong Jin, gathers the unconscious girl in his arms and then laughs when he realizes she is faking. “What we have here is an actress.” She is delivered to a world of tutors and servants, who groom her to become Korea’s greatest actress and Dong Jin’s wife. The storyline opens 50 years later. Soong Nan, now retired and twice widowed, has, over the years, earned and lost fortunes, murdered a man and seduced another to suppress his blackmail threats—all, she believes, for her family’s legacy. Believing, finally, that the past is past, she travels to Hawaii to spend time with her three children (two by Dong Jin and one by her American husband, Captain Henry Lee). But she finds her son has become an impotent, selfish drunk; her daughter Won Ju has married a womanizing “haole” Hawaiian after recovering from a brutal rape; and her “American” UC Berkeley English major daughter Darian only understands her Korean heritage through books. Soong Nan’s only hope is her 15-year-old grandson Brandon, who pays entirely too much attention to his uncle’s stripper-wife, a native Hawaiian. Told in alternating chapters from each family member’s point of view, this tale reveals and examines Korean and Hawaiian cultural traits that both define and undermine family ties.
An earnest but dour debut.Pub Date: April 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-56947-420-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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