This story is filled with as much heartache and healing as it is historical significance.
A Korean American doctor is forced into retirement and a confrontation with his past when a secret he's kept about his family surfaces.
Yungman Kwak, who came to the U.S. after the Korean War, has been the only practicing obstetrician in Horse’s Breath, Minnesota, for decades. When the holding corporation that runs the hospital where he works closes its doors, he’s lucky to escape with his pension. His son, Einstein, who lives in the Twin Cities with his wife and son, works for the same company and encourages his father to take a job in the emerging field of “Retailicine” to pass the time. Einstein fulfilled his parents’ traditional expectations of graduating from Harvard and becoming a doctor himself. But he’s also enamored with an entrepreneurial tech-bro ethos Yungman doesn't understand. A good portion of the book is a biting critique of a predatory American health care system and the economy at large. As a co-founder of the Asian American Writers Workshop, Lee has long been a leading voice in the literary world. She organizes this saga into five sections, each more gripping than the last, as the story travels through time and across continents to describe the many obstacles Yungman faces on his journey from a boy forced to flee his village to a medical student in Seoul competing to woo a charismatic classmate to a man who leaves his home country for greater opportunity elsewhere. Lee delves deeper into Yungman’s roots and explores myriad aspects of Korean history, not least of which is an overdue accounting of the suffering America’s occupation and war caused. Yungman is a survivor, and the novel explores how the choices so many immigrants make, the secrets they keep, the risks they take, big and small, can lead to good fortune or failure. The novel also elucidates with remarkable feeling how war reverberates through a person’s lifetime—their body, mind, and memories—no matter how far in the past it may seem.
This story is filled with as much heartache and healing as it is historical significance.Pub Date: May 24, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3507-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
A debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.
A high school senior pursues an affair with her teacher.
Seventeen-year-old Waldo, the narrator of McCurdy’s fiction debut, lives in Anchorage, Alaska, with her mother, though she’s long been the parent in their relationship. She heats her own frozen meals and pays the bills on time while her mom chases man after man and makes well-meaning promises she never keeps. Waldo blows her Victoria’s Secret wages on online shopping sprees and binges on junk food, inevitably crashing after the fleeting highs of her indulgences. Mr. Korgy, her creative writing teacher, has “thinning hair and nose pores”; he’s 40 years old and married with a child. Nevertheless—or possibly as a result?—Waldo’s attraction to him is “instant. So sudden it’s alarming. So palpable it’s confusing.” Mr. Korgy professes to want to keep their friendship aboveboard, but after a sexual encounter at the school’s winter formal that she initiates, an affair begins. Will this reckless pursuit be the one that actually satisfies Waldo, and is she as mature as she thinks she is? Waldo is a keen observer of people and provides sharp commentary on the punishing work of female beauty. Readers of McCurdy’s bestselling memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died (2022), will surely be curious about the tumultuous mother-daughter relationship, and it is one of the novel’s highlights, full of realistic pity and anger and need. (“I want to scream at her. I want her to hug me.”) Unfortunately, the prose is often unwieldy and sometimes downright cringeworthy: When Waldo tells Mr. Korgy she loves him, “The words hang in the air in that constipated way they do when you know that you shouldn’t have said them.” Waldo frequently lists emotions and adjectives in triplicate, and events that could be significant aren’t sufficiently explored or given enough space to breathe before the novel races on to the next thing.
A debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593723739
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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