Please Look After Mom

December 6, 2010
Shin's affecting English-language debut centers on the life of a hardworking, uncomplaining woman who goes missing in a bustling Seoul subway station. After Park So-nyo's disappearance, her grown children and her husband are filled with guilt and remorse at having taken So-nyo for granted and reflect, in a round-robin of narration, on her life and role in their lives. Having, through Mom's unstinting dedication, achieved professional success, her children understand for the first time the hardships she endured. Her irresponsible and harshly critical husband, meanwhile, finally acknowledges the depth of his love and the seriousness of her sacrifices for him. Narrating in her own voice late in the book, the spirit of Mom watches her family and finally voices her lifelong loneliness and depression and recalls the one secret in her life. As memories accrue, the narrative becomes increasingly poignant and psychologically revealing of all the characters, and though it does sometimes go soggy with pathos, most readers should find resonance in this family story, a runaway bestseller in Korea poised for a similar run here.

January 1, 2011

A mother's disappearance exposes family consciences, secrets and dependencies in the soft-spoken first English-language publication by a bestselling South Korean novelist.

An enormous publishing success in South Korea, this simple portrait of a family shocked into acknowledging the strength and heroic self-sacrifice of the woman at its center is both universal and socially specific. Park So-nyo, the illiterate mother who disappeared at Seoul Station subway, separated from her husband by the pressing crowd, has devoted her life to her marriage and children, applying herself to multiple rural occupations while encouraging all her offspring, but in particular son Hyong-chol, to fulfill his academic potential. The narration by four different family members exposes guilt and insights all around, from unmarried daughter Chi-hon, a novelist, to Park So-nyo herself.

Partly a metaphor for Korea's social shift from rural to urban, partly an elegy to the intensity of family bonds as constructed and maintained by self-denying women, this is subdued, tender writing with only rare lapses into sentimentality.

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November 1, 2010

In Shin's first book translated into English, a million-copy best seller in South Korea that has been sold to 18 countries, a woman in from the countryside is separated from her husband in the Seoul train station, and the family spends the rest of the novel hunting for her. At first look, this would appear to be one of those quietly blunt-spoken books that keeps gathering strength, and Shin has the credentials to back great expectations: she's won numerous awards in Korea, plus France's Prix de l'Inapercu. Could go big; grab the reading group guide.

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 15, 2010
This novel from widely acclaimed Korean author Shin focuses on motherhood and family guilt. Park So-nyo, mother of four now-adult children, has gone missing in a Seoul train station on the way to visit them. The novel is told in four parts, from the perspectives of, first, her daughter, and then, her firstborn son, her husband, and finally, So-nyo herself. Composed almost entirely in second-person narration, the writing is sharp, biting, and intensely moving. So-nyos children continually battle with their own guilt for not taking better care of her while reminiscing about the times when they were young, growing up in incredible poverty in the countryside. The children come to terms with their mothers absence in their own ways, and their father repents for a lifetime of neglect. When So-nyos voice enters the narrative, the portrait of a troubled but loving family is complete. Secrets are revealed, and the heart of a mother is beautifully exposed. This Korean million-plus-copy best-seller is an impressive exploration of family love, poverty, and triumphing over hardship.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)