The Queen of Tears
A Novel of Contemporary Hawai'i
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A woman with a turbulent past fights for her family’s future, in a saga spanning from the Korean War to modern-day Hawaii.
By age fourteen, Park Soong Nan was on her own—fleeing the communists, a waif living in the streets of Seoul, begging from American soldiers and stealing food. Then fate dramatically intervened, and only five years later, she was the brightest star of Korean cinema, nicknamed “The Queen of Tears.”
Decades later, she has come to visit her three grown children, who have settled in Hawaii. One son has yet another business venture he’s hoping she will bankroll. Her daughter Won Ju is staying in an unhappy marriage purely for the sake of her troubled teenage son. And her younger daughter, Darian, has dropped out of college on the mainland, searching for a way to honor her ethnic heritage.
Becoming more deeply enmeshed in her children’s lives, Soong Nan finds herself reflecting on her own as well—as her arrival sets off smoldering jealousies, dormant longings, and a desperate rivalry for her affection. . . .
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Front-loaded with deft character portraits, this multigenerational family saga, picked up from Hawaii's Mutual Publishing, fails to fulfill its considerable potential. An expatriate Korean former movie star, Soong Nan Lee has traveled to Honolulu in an attempt to solve her American children's highly American problems: elder daughter Wong Ju is keeping her loveless marriage together for the sake of her spoiled, alienated teenage son; middle child Donny is marrying a stripper named Crystal; and younger daughter Darian is dropping out of Berkeley and shacking up with Crystal's drug-dealer brother. The family's fights and reconciliations are told from alternating points of view and are intercut throughout with Soong Nan's flashbacks to her violent, glamorous past in 1950s Seoul. In describing Soong Nan's geisha-like training for stardom, McKinney (Bolohead Row) demonstrates a talent for restraint and tight pacing. It peters out, however, as the angles multiply: when Wong Ju's traumatic coming-of-age in Las Vegas is revisited at length, her character is lent a newfound depth, but McKinney abandons her for one of many floundering side plots. And just as the family as a whole is finally finding fulfillment and success by building a business together, an improbable disaster intervenes. The result is a shocking, unsatisfying shift into melodrama.
