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
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
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