Equal parts hilarity and heartbreak in an accomplished debut.
In Yune’s moving and darkly comic debut novel, a young Korean-American man struggles to come to terms with his cultural identity and dysfunctional working-class family.
When Jason’s father loses his blue-collar job, he sends his young son and Jason’s antagonistic brother, Tommy, to stay with a friend called “the doctor” and his wife in Princeton, New Jersey, while he looks for work. Once he’s situated in a job at a book bindery in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Tommy is called home to live with their now-overworked and abusive father, but Jason remains in the doctor’s household, where he’s brought up in affluence and privilege. The father’s suicide brings the rival brothers back together, as Jason discovers he has inherited his father’s house. Both brothers take work at the Wilkes-Barre book bindery, determined that their father’s former workplace holds the secret to his premature death. The brothers are ultimately disappointed by the banal truth surrounding their father’s suicide, and when Tommy is let go after a physical altercation with another employee, Jason eventually leaves the physically and emotionally oppressive work behind to follow his brother and attend college in Pittsburgh. There, the siblings’ tense relationship deepens as Jason attempts to refine his sense of identity and Tommy’s drinking and drug use spiral further out of control. With neither brother able to get much traction in their lives, Jason returns to the doctor’s household for a respite, while his brother comes perilously close to self-destruction. The brothers seem best able to relate as part of triangular relationships, first with their father and later with a charming art student named Kate, and Yune’s exploration of this dynamic is fascinating. The prose is frequently stunning, as in a description of Tommy’s role in a bar fight: “…he was throwing himself before the mercy of the nation’s sharp young men, bulging with bovine growth hormone, testosterone, and date rape.” Yune also proves himself an expert at wry observation: “Reading,” he writes of the dehumanizing atmosphere of the bindery, “was forbidden in the book factory.”
Equal parts hilarity and heartbreak in an accomplished debut.Pub Date: June 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-1632260444
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Thought Catalog Books/Prospecta Press
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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