A good saga of family life and traumas that calls out for a brisker pace and a lighter touch: Second-novelist Yun (House of...
The troubled relations between twin sisters who grew up among the Korean immigrants of New York.
Twins, so they say, have a strange psychic bond. True or not, it is indisputable that twin sisters Inah and Yunah are exceptionally—perhaps excruciatingly—close. They were born in 1973 in South Korea of parents who were both schoolteachers; their childhood was happy and unremarkable until about the age of six, when Inah was horribly scalded in a kitchen accident that left her face permanently disfigured. Knowing that such a handicap would doom their daughter to the life of an outcast in Korea, Mom and Dad emigrated with Inah and Yunah to New York, where the family settled in the heavily Korean neighborhood of Flushing and Dad took a job at his uncle Shin’s trading company in Manhattan. Yunah narrates half of the story in flashback, describing the twins’ childhood, while in alternate chapters she gives a present-day account of her trip to visit Inah in Italy (where she has lately fled after dropping her graduate studies at Oxford and backpacking through India). Uncommunicative and sullen, Inah makes it clear that she resents her sister’s following her to Europe, and most of their time together in Italy is taken up in bickering and recrimination. Over what? The failure of Ina’s Oxford career? Their father’s temporary abandonment of their mother for another woman? The blight of Ina’s disfigurement? Or something else, something deeper and less accessible? Sibling rivalry can last for years, of course, and the closer the bond the greater the turmoil. So the two are in for a pretty good fight.
A good saga of family life and traumas that calls out for a brisker pace and a lighter touch: Second-novelist Yun (House of the Winds, 1998) drags the story on too long before we see the point—yet after we’ve gotten the picture.Pub Date: June 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-7434-8356-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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