Stone Angels
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In this extraordinary novel, a forty-year-old woman journeys to her cultural homeland—and uncovers a harrowing secret that makes her rethink everything she thought she knew about her mother.
"An unforgettable story about mothers, daughters, and sisters reaching inward for solace and strength when society has failed them, ultimately triumphant in love." ―Jimin Han, author of The Apology
Angelina Lee feels like she doesn’t belong. Newly divorced and completely unmoored by the sudden, tragic death of her mother, she hopes studying Korean will reconnect her to her roots. But nothing about Seoul feels familiar. Further complicating matters is the resurgence of an alluring man from Angelina’s past, and fellow classmate Keisuke Ono, an irritatingly good-looking Japanese American journalist who refuses to leave her alone.
Angelina is reluctant to admit the true reason for her trip—trying to understand her mother's suicide. A shocking conversation with an estranged relative proves her suspicion correct: her mother had an older sister, Sunyuh, who disappeared under the Japanese occupation of Korea during WWII—a secret the family buried for over sixty years.
Angelina knows, deep down, her mother’s fateful decision must be linked to Sunyuh. To find answers, Angelina embarks on a journey that takes her across oceans and continents, and challenges everything she believed about herself and her heritage.
Told through the bold, determined voices of three women, this poignant family drama explores love, grief, healing, and the complicated love that exists between mothers and daughters. It’s about the questions we wish we had asked lost relatives, the lives we could have lived had we made different choices, and, above all, second chances.
"At turns lyrical and raw, Stone Angels is a haunting novel that will stay with the reader long past the final page, perfect for fans of Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko or Jing-Jing Lee’s How We Disappeared." ―A.H. Kim, author of A Good Family and Relative Strangers
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Rho's immersive debut novel (after the memoir American Seoul), a Pittsburgh woman explores her Korean roots. In 2006, recent divorcee Angelina Lee travels to South Korea, which she left at age six, to attend a summer university program in Seoul. Hoping to reunite with family she doesn't remember and grieving her mother's recent death by suicide, Angelina goes to Gwangju to meet a cousin and their grandmother. She discovers that her mother had an older sister, Sunyuh-unni, who was abducted by the Japanese in the 1940s and forced to work in a brothel. Though her grandmother has dementia, and her cousin is convinced that Sunyuh is dead, Angelina sets out to find her with the help of a fellow student and journalist named Keisuke Ono. The two search records, talk to a survivor of the brothels, and begin an affair, which Angelina ends, believing the younger man isn't ready to become a step-parent to her two children. Rho expertly explores her characters' complex emotions, especially Angelina's, as she struggles to find contentment following a contentious divorce and wrestles with guilt over her inability to prevent her mother's death. Readers will savor this weighty family drama.
