What do readers think of The Future Perfect by Cay Kim? Write your own review.

This is a complex mother-daughter story with multicultural aspects set between Korea and the US. Both mother and daughter have no names in the telling. A woman born in Seoul to a mother who espouses the Korean post-war philosophy of resilience and endurance chafes against this. When the mother goes to the US (Minnesota) to attend school, she sends her daughter to a private school there to learn English but as the girl becomes a teenager, tensions arise between the two and when the mother returns to Korea to care for the grandmother, the daughter stays (she's older at this point). Eventually the daughter returns with the realization that her mother's sacrifice to give her daughter the ability to determine her own fate is one she didn't realize and never said thank you for.

This to me was a most bitter story. The mother struggles for her identity and her daughter's but neither sees the other side of the struggle. The pathos and sadness of the story can be overwhelming. I was though somewhat gladdened by the book's ending though. My biggest criticism of the book was that I was thrown off in the reading by the overuse of "you" and "her" - I sensed this use was to accentuate the feeling of melancholy and was perhaps intentional but it was off putting and didn't allow me to connect with a character. While the novel Rebecca has a narrator with no name, I think I might have enjoyed this book better if someone had a name.

I’d like to thank NetGalley and Riverhead Books for granting me access to this ARC.