An enjoyable book offering a portrait of a young woman struggling to come into her own in the increasingly complicated...
A young Korean-American woman grapples with issues of identity, family, and love in Park’s debut novel, a sweet and savvy bildungsroman.
Jane Re is a recent college graduate whose high-finance job offer evaporated when the dot-com bubble burst. Now she’s stuck restocking shelves and serving irritable customers at Food, her disapproving aunt and uncle’s grocery store. It doesn’t help that everyone in her Korean immigrant neighborhood knows she's an orphan, and honhyol (mixed-blood) to boot. While her friends from school are off to impressive professional jobs, Jane is stuck in unfashionable Queens, wrestling with the broken door of the walk-in freezer, the constant criticism of her appearance (“Koreanish”) and behavior, and the uncomfortable rigidity of family life. When her geeky friend Eunice Oh suggests she apply for an au pair job in Brooklyn, Jane finds herself plunged into a bewilderingly different cultural context that turns out to be a brave new world. The book is, in its own way, both a historical novel and a novel of place. Park’s lovingly detailed descriptions reveal Brooklyn, Queens, and Seoul as seen by an intelligent 20-something in the first years of the 21st century. A varied cast of characters—women’s-studies professors, a Chinese adoptee, an Italian immigrant babysitter with a talent for home renovation—is drawn with affectionate respect. Park does a lovely job of tracing Jane’s growing maturity and self-knowledge. Her experiences facing her family history and complex identity when she visits South Korea to see her dying grandfather nicely mirror those among Korean immigrants and others in the U.S. Park is a fine writer with an eye for the effects of class and ethnic identity, a sense of humor, and a compassionate view of human weakness who nevertheless doesn't make the rookie error of letting her characters off easy.
An enjoyable book offering a portrait of a young woman struggling to come into her own in the increasingly complicated opening years of a new century.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-525-42740-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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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