Min evokes period and place as well as characters with stringent attention and honesty.
In Min’s troubling yet lovely debut, a Korean-American burn victim circa 1976 tries to make sense of the house fire that killed her parents.
While recovering from burns over 30% of her body, 18-year-old Isadora Myung Hee Sohn—Isa for short—looks back on her life and the life of her parents to understand why one of them set the fatal fire the night before Isa was to graduate from high school. Isa’s father, a scientist and professor in Albany, had always seemed cold and remote. Her docile mother, a beautiful former ballerina lightly scarred from a fire in her own childhood, had returned to college to study poetry. Isa, an only child since her younger brother died in a tragic accident, rejected much of her parents’ Korean culture and rebelled against her father’s authoritarian rules. Ambivalent about standing out, she wanted to be fully American. She spent more and more time at her friend Rachel’s house, drawn as much by Rachel’s messy but relaxed parents as by Rachel. Isa became romantically involved with another outsider at school, Hero, a blind Albino who imagined himself the next Johnny Winter. After his parents threatened to send him to a special school for the visually impaired, Hero convinced Isa and Rachel to run away with him to California. The three shared a moment of sexual experimentation that titillated yet frightened them before they were apprehended and brought home, their relationships shattered. Still distraught at losing Hero, Isa caught her mother kissing her poetry professor. She told her father, who was, of course, crushed. After the fire, Isa assumes her father’s responsibility until she reads his journal, which makes clear that he was incapable of such violence. Isa recognizes that her mother set the fire, but realizes that placing guilt matters less than appreciating her own survival. Isa’s parents remain cloudy but powerful mysteries.
Min evokes period and place as well as characters with stringent attention and honesty.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26344-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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