“A moving portrayal of the surprising nature, sudden Edwidge Danticat, author of Breath, Eyes, Memory and Brother, I’m Dying Cleverly structured and brimming with secrets and revelations, Please Look After Mom is a powerful and memorable read. We join this family as soon as we open these pages and we never quite leave it.
Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love StoryĪ suspenseful and moving book. This is a tapestry of family life that will be read all over the world. But it also speaks beautifully to an urgent issue of our time: migration, and how the movement of people from small towns and villages to big cities can cause heartbreak and even tragedy. Please Look After Mom is an authentic, moving story that brings to vivid life the deep family connections that lie at the core of Korean culture. Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of March. In spare, exquisite prose, Kyung-sook Shin penetrates the very essence of what it means to be a family, and a human being.”. Please Look After Mom takes us on a dual journey, to the unfamiliar corners of a foreign culture and into the shadowy recesses of the heart. Here is a wonderful, original new voice, by turns plangent and piquant. Readers should find resonance in this family story, a runaway bestseller in Korea poised for a similar run here. Partly a metaphor for Korea’s social shift from rural to urban, partly an elegy to the intensity of family bonds as constructed and maintained by self-denying women, this is tender writing.” -Īffecting. The narration by four different family members exposes guilt and insights all around, from unmarried daughter Chi-hon, a novelist, to herself. An enormous publishing success in South Korea, this simple portrait of a family shocked into acknowledging the strength and heroic self-sacrifice of the woman at its center is both universal and socially specific. Stay tuned: Mom should be one of this year’s most-deserving bestsellers.Ī mother’s disappearance exposes family consciences, secrets and dependencies. VERDICT: Already a prominent writer in Korea, Shin finally makes her English-language debut with what will appeal to all readers who appreciate compelling, page-turning prose.
Shin’s breathtaking novel is an acute reminder of how easily a family can fracture, how little we truly know one another, and how desperate need can sometimes overshadow even the deepest love. In four distinct voices, the character of Mom-a rural farmwoman whose ‘hands could nurture any life - is reassembled by her eldest daughter, whose books Mom couldn’t read her eldest son, for whom she could never do enough her husband, who never slowed down and finally Mom herself as she wanders through memories both strange and familiar.
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