What We Kept to Ourselves
A Novel
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- ¥1,900
発行者による作品情報
A “propulsive and moving story of a family torn asunder by their mother’s disappearance” (Bookreporter) from the New York Times bestselling author of The Last Story of Mina Lee.
1999: At the end of the millennium, the Kim family is struggling to move on after their mother, Sunny, vanished a year ago. Sixty-one-year-old John Kim feels more isolated from his grown children than ever before. One evening, their fragile lives are further upended when John finds the body of an unhoused stranger in the backyard with a letter to Sunny, leaving the family with more questions than ever.
1977: Newly married, Sunny is pregnant and has just moved to Los Angeles from Korea with her hardworking and often-absent husband. America is not turning out the way she had dreamed it to be, and the loneliness and isolation are broken only by a fateful encounter with a veteran at a bus stop. The unexpected connection spans decades and echoes into the family’s lives in the present as they uncover devastating secrets that put not only everything they thought they knew about their mother but their very lives at risk.
Both “an intricately crafted mystery and a heart-wrenching family saga” (Michelle Min Sterling, New York Times bestselling author), set against the backdrop of social unrest and Y2K, What We Kept to Ourselves masterfully explores memory, storytelling, forgiveness, and what it means to dream in America.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kim follows up The Last Story of Mina Lee with an ambitious if unwieldy look at the lives of the Korean-American Kim family: patriarch John; his wife, Sunny; and their children, college-age Ana and high school senior Ronald. The action kicks off in 1999 Los Angeles, a year after Sunny has left the family with little explanation. One afternoon, John discovers a body in the family's backyard, and in the dead man's hand is a letter addressed to Sunny. Police are quick to declare the death an accident and move on, but Ana and Ronald are eager to identify the deceased and find out what linked him to their mother. Flashbacks to the 1970s flesh out John and Sunny's relationship, their early lives in Korea, and Sunny's difficulty adjusting to America when she and John arrive in Los Angeles. Kim sets a laundry list of worthy themes in her crosshairs—including racial discrimination, police corruption, and the struggles of Asian women in and out of the family—and explores them sensitively, but sometimes stumbles in wedding those themes to the novel's plot. The resulting speed bumps aren't a deal-breaker, but they make it difficult to remain engaged in the central mystery. Still, strong prose and evident passion make this worthwhile.
