This bumpy tale about two young women finding themselves and reconnecting across cultures glimmers with beautiful portrayals...
A debut novel focuses on two South Korean sisters reunited in Los Angeles seeking success and love.
Sally Lee-Grant, who left South Korea for America when she was a child, hasn’t seen her younger sister, Jinhee, in 16 years. When Jinhee arrives in LA, Sally reminisces about the kids they used to be. But Sally’s American life is not the way that Jinhee imagined. Sally, a struggling actress, lives in a less-than-glamorous apartment with her aspiring screenwriter fiance, Jason. She is supposed to aid her mother and sister, but barely supports herself as a cocktail waitress at a sleazy club. Ever since she was born, Sally hasn’t fit in. Sgt. George Grant, an American soldier, helped her mother during Sally’s birth. When Sally’s mother announced that she was in financial distress and her two daughters must live with relatives, George returned and made an enticing offer. He wanted to adopt Sally and take her to America. Sally agreed to go if her mother would keep Jinhee at home. Jinhee felt betrayed when her sister and George departed for the U.S. Now, Sally tries to help Jinhee get a job, navigate LA, acquire a green card, and learn to drive. Through Jinhee’s eyes, readers see the struggles of moving to a new nation, longing for home, and attempting to assimilate. When she is called as a witness in a court case, it leads her to make a difficult decision, and Sally finds herself in a new phase of her life. Kim’s novel moves back and forth between the present (1999) and the past (Jinhee and Sally’s childhood in South Korea). The descriptions of South Korea and LA are vivid, bountiful with imagery of food and city life. There is a zany cast of characters that surrounds the sisters’ childhood and the store that their parents own. But the author often uses parentheticals to define Korean terms, which is jarring and redundant as the book includes a glossary. In addition, the opening chapter is messy. It features an unnecessary monologue by Sally in a tone that is not repeated anywhere else, followed by a rushed dream sequence and Jinhee’s sudden arrival.
This bumpy tale about two young women finding themselves and reconnecting across cultures glimmers with beautiful portrayals of home and a new country.Pub Date: June 18, 2018
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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