The Queens of K-Town
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
The story of four damaged girls who love and avenge one another in the playground of New York’s Korea-town. Reminiscent of Jeffrey Eugenides’s 'The Virgin Suicides' and Joyce Carol Oates’s 'Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang', 'The Queens of K-town' introduces us to twenty-six-year-old Cora Moon. She returns to New York bruised, broken-hearted, and on the verge of ending it all. Ten years after she watched her best friend leap off the roof of a building, she’s trying to hold onto the pieces of her own fragile existence while reliving her past. Her days are flooded with memories of her first summer there, when she became entrenched in a tight-knit group of girls who roamed the fluorescent alleyways of K-town. Along with her new teenage friends — Bev, Mina, and Soo Young — Cora navigated the fast-paced maze of nightclubs and hostess bars, engaging in backroom brawls and disastrous private meals with Korean mafia members. A haunting tale of desire and loss, and sex and suicide, 'The Queens of K-Town' marks the arrival of a brave new voice in fiction.
About the Author: Angela Mi Young Hur was born in Los Angeles and raised in Gardena, California. She attended Andover, Harvard, and Notre Dame, where she received her MFA and was a Sparks Fellow and the Managing Editor of the 'Notre Dame Review'. Upon graduation, she was awarded the Sparks Prize, which allowed her to write full-time for a year. She currently lives in Long Beach. 'The Queens of K-town' is her first novel.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This uneven first novel, a meditation on stress and suicide among young Korean-American women, has some wonderfully telling details: where another heroine might ice her lover's wounds with a bag of frozen peas (standard issue from the props department), Cora Moon uses frozen edamame. Fleeing grad school and a bad breakup for New York's Koreatown, Cora, 26, arrives at her borrowed apartment to find a crowd gathered: a young woman on the roof is getting ready to jump, and the doorman says she's the third in 15 years. From there, dual narratives look back over the suicide of Cora's high school friend and forward through Cora's reckoning with her own desire to jump. A little dark humor helps: buying 50 cards to write suicide notes in bulk, Cora throws in an extra: "Poor Sophie would have to deliver these... she decided she'd get her sister a gift certificate at a bookstore to show her gratitude." Rough structural edges and sometimes awkward language make this a promising but flawed debut.
