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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Oct 2006, 288 pages
Paperback:
Feb 2008, 288 pages
Book Reviewed by:
BookBrowse Review Team
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Isadora Myung Hee Sohn, known as Isa, worships her mother, an exceptional beauty. Isa’s father, a scientist and professor, and an orphan, is haunted by the war in which he served as a South Korean soldier and by a painful secret that he keeps from his wife. Still mourning the death of Isa’s younger brother her parents are traditional enough to prize their dead son over their living daughter; to them, Isa only half exists. Recommended for older teens and adults.
A brilliant novel from an exciting new writer.
Isadora Myung Hee Sohn—Isa—worships her mother, an exceptional beauty, born in Seoul and sheltered in a harem of sisters inside the wealthy family’s compound. Isa’s father, a scientist and professor, an orphan, is haunted by the war in which he served as a South Korean soldier and by a painful secret that he keeps from his wife. Still mourning the death of Isa’s younger brother, Stephen, her parents are traditional enough to prize their dead son over their living daughter; to them, Isa only half exists.
But unlike many Asian American daughters, Isa is neither meek nor a quiet victim of tradition. Despite her parents’ success and sophistication—they’ve achieved the American dream—she repudiates their values, embarks on her own sexual education, and runs away with an albino boy, Hero. At the same time, Isa suspects that despite her mother’s strict adherence to Korean traditional values, she is involved with another man, and Isa determines to make the affair known. What begins as a child’s unthinking fury at her mother soon leads to more deadly consequences.
A daring, haunting, inspired debut.
Secondhand World
My name is Isadora Myung Hee Sohn and I am eighteen years old. I was recently ninety-five days on a pediatric burn unit at Tri-State Medical Center, in Albany, New York, being treated for second- and third-degree burns on my legs, complicated by a recurring bacterial infection. The same fire that injured me killed my parents, Hae Kyoung Chung and Tae Mun Sohn, on June 11, 1976, at approximately 3:20 a.m.
It's very isolating to recover from a severe burn injury. The pain requires a great deal of attention and inward focus. While your skin tissue rages and dies, you try and put yourself as far away as possible mentally, to take refuge in small, retrievable thoughts. Nursery rhymes are sometimes useful, as are television theme songs and knock-knock jokes.
Here's a riddle. A jumbo jet takes off from New York en route to Vancouver with 246 people on board. There's a massive snowstorm, visibility worsens, passengers pray and panic. The pilot ...
Min also illuminates a universal truth - that all of us are to an extent "second-generation" children, because we're all born into a secondhand world, "what is novel to us is only so because we're newborn"; and each of us must find our own place in this hand-me-down society...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
John Dalton, author of Heaven Lake
What makes this novel so memorable — and hard to put down — is the realness and urgency of its emotion. It’s a force that commands the reader from one aching and beautifully concise chapter to the next. Secondhand World is both powerful and intimate and offers us a piercing, new view of immigrant isolation.Katherine Min was born in
Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, and
graduated from Amherst College and the
Columbia School of Journalism. She
currently teaches at Plymouth State
University and the Iowa Summer Writing
Festival.
Her short stories have appeared in many
publications and have been anthologized,
most recently in The Pushcart Book of
Stories: The Best Short Stories from a
Quarter-Century of The Pushcart Prize.
"Eyelids" was listed as one of 100
distinguished stories in The Best
American Short Stories of 1997. "The
Brick" was read on National Public
...
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