Like wind against rock: a novel

Soon-to-be divorced Alice Markson (née Chang) has moved back home with her widowed mother, though she hasn't told her about the divorce. Ah Ma is not acting like a typical Korean widow; she's dressing younger than her daughter, working successfully in real estate, and actively dating. Alice has a notebook that she found in the discard pile of her father's things, but she can't read it because it is in Korean. Still, she thinks it is an important way to honor her father's memory. She asks her neighborhood librarian, Mr. Park, to translate. What he finds is traumatic to him, and he says it will be to Alice, too. Though the novel is set in sprawling suburban Southern California, the connections between characters give the novel a small-town feel. The immigrant lifestyle of Korean Americans is touched upon as family relationships change and grow, sometimes in outrageous ways. Readers will keep turning the pages to see what twists Kim (Chinhominey's Secret, 1999) will imagine next.

Long-buried family secrets threaten to ripple dangerously through a Korean American community when Alice Chang Markson's father dies unexpectedly, and her mother immediately transforms herself from traditional Korean wife into a sexy, swinging single and successful businesswoman. Mystified by her mother's behavior and unmoored by her own recent divorce, Alice decides to have her father's private journal translated, believing it holds the key to understanding her parents' marriage and how she herself became an underachieving, sweatpants-wearing couch potato in her late 30s, living in her childhood home after the failure of a stable but childless and passionless 14-year marriage. Shot through with humor and empathy, this well-crafted novel weaves together the stories of various lives of quiet desperation, with themes of first- and second-generation immigrant identity and belonging, from different perspectives. VERDICT Kim's second novel (after Chinhominey's Secret) is a slow-moving but compelling intergenerational family drama set in a Korean American community in Southern California. Readers will root for Alice to emerge from a decades-long crisis of confidence and self-doubt to reach her full potential.--Laurie Cavanaugh, Thayer P.L., Braintree, MA

Soon-to-be divorced Alice Markson (née Chang) has moved back home with her widowed mother, though she hasn't told her about the divorce. Ah Ma is not acting like a typical Korean widow; she's dressing younger than her daughter, working successfully in real estate, and actively dating. Alice has a notebook that she found in the discard pile of her father's things, but she can't read it because it is in Korean. Still, she thinks it is an important way to honor her father's memory. She asks her neighborhood librarian, Mr. Park, to translate. What he finds is traumatic to him, and he says it will be to Alice, too. Though the novel is set in sprawling suburban Southern California, the connections between characters give the novel a small-town feel. The immigrant lifestyle of Korean Americans is touched upon as family relationships change and grow, sometimes in outrageous ways. Readers will keep turning the pages to see what twists Kim (Chinhominey's Secret, 1999) will imagine next. Copyright 2021 Booklist Reviews.

Long-buried family secrets threaten to ripple dangerously through a Korean American community when Alice Chang Markson's father dies unexpectedly, and her mother immediately transforms herself from traditional Korean wife into a sexy, swinging single and successful businesswoman. Mystified by her mother's behavior and unmoored by her own recent divorce, Alice decides to have her father's private journal translated, believing it holds the key to understanding her parents' marriage and how she herself became an underachieving, sweatpants-wearing couch potato in her late 30s, living in her childhood home after the failure of a stable but childless and passionless 14-year marriage. Shot through with humor and empathy, this well-crafted novel weaves together the stories of various lives of quiet desperation, with themes of first- and second-generation immigrant identity and belonging, from different perspectives. VERDICT Kim's second novel (after Chinhominey's Secret) is a slow-moving but compelling intergenerational family drama set in a Korean American community in Southern California. Readers will root for Alice to emerge from a decades-long crisis of confidence and self-doubt to reach her full potential.—Laurie Cavanaugh, Thayer P.L., Braintree, MA