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A Novel
by Cay Kim
A radiant portrait of a young woman caught between cultures, and what is lost and found in the struggle to succeed.
Before you are anything, you are a daughter.
At first you are at home inside your pregnant mother: a beloved daughter, a vision of the future. But who will you become?
As your family moves back and forth between Korea and the United States, you find yourself caught between two countries. Prioritizing your future over her own happiness, your mother marshals you through a childhood of homework and violin practice and academic achievement to shape you into the person she most wants you to be. Is hers the ultimate form of love? And, despite her sacrifices, is there a world somewhere between your motherland and homeland that can feel like your own?
Told in incandescent prose, Cay Kim's exquisite debut novel is a portrait of a brilliant young woman growing up between cultures, and a love letter to girlhood, family, and the great dreams we hold for ourselves, no matter where we're from.
"Kim's portrait of a tightly wound mother and struggling child is obsessive, often harsh, increasingly fraught, rendered all the more stifling through its detached narration, which allows little space for interiority. The tension between cultural expectation, family history, and parent-child attachment is the crux of the switchback, episodic, often uncomfortable story...An intense first novel puts the burden of upbringing under a piercing scrutiny." —Kirkus Reviews
"[U]neven...While Kim ably captures the weight of a parent's sacrifice and resentment, the narrative pulls its punches at the end, leaving readers frustrated and perplexed. It's an evocative if undercooked story." —Publishers Weekly
"A book I have been waiting for all my life. Cay Kim has written a daring, sonic, incandescent debut, full of verve and heartache. A story about the pain and love between daughters and mothers, the deep gulf between desire and duty, and the particular experience of straddling both Korean and American homelands, this is a magnificent debut." —Crystal Hana Kim, author of The Stone Home and If You Leave Me
"Timeless, taut, and daringly tempestuous ... A masterful and unforgettable debut." —Paul Beatty, author of the Booker Prize–winning The Sellout
This information about The Future Perfect was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Cay Kim was born in Seoul in 1998. She received her BA from Stanford University, where she won the Urmy/Hardy Poetry Prize, and her MFA from Columbia University. Her writing has appeared in Granta. This is her first novel.
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