Shelter

November 23, 2015
In her intense debut, Jung explores the powerful legacy of familial violence and the difficulty of finding the strength and grace to forgive. As the novel opens, Kyung Cho and his wife, Gillian, are on the verge of financial calamity: they are deep in debt, and selling their house in suburban Boston won’t help—their mortgage is underwater. Just when Gillian has almost convinced Kyung to swallow his pride and move in with his wealthy parents, Kyung learns that his parents have been the victims of a brutal home invasion. In an instant, Kyung must decide whether to find room in his home (and his heart) for his traumatized parents. Doing so, however, requires him to bridge the distance he’s deliberately maintained from them, to overcome the resentment he bears toward his parents for his unhappy childhood and his persistent feelings of failure. As Kyung’s situation grows increasingly unstable, he finds himself lapsing into familiar patterns of anger, distrust, and violence. Despite some lengthy asides, especially in the novel’s first half, that threaten to drown the narrative momentum in emotional reflection, a lot happens in this family drama rife with tension and unexpected ironies. Kyung’s greatest struggle, in the end, is learning how to see not only his own life but also his parents’ with clarity and understanding.

January 1, 2016
A fluidly written debut novel that explores violence and its effects on one immigrant family. Education, marriage, and suburban comfort can't protect second-generation Korean-American Kyung Cho from his past--or his future--in Yun's layered, sometimes surprising debut. Kyung's 4-year-old son is difficult, his job unsatisfying, his marriage strained. The family finances are disastrous. Kyung and his wife, Gillian, are finally forced to consider renting out their home and moving in with his distant and disapproving parents. But even as they chat with the real estate agent, their world is turned upside down: Mae, Kyung's mother, is walking toward the house, naked and battered. The events that follow move smoothly through time as Kyung struggles with buried traumas while desperately trying to respond to fresh ones. Yun's plotting is muscular; when another writer might have started to wind down, she offers unexpected developments, making for a sophisticated story that maintains its narrative momentum right to the end. On the other hand, Kyung's character can be frustratingly one-dimensional. Yun often anatomizes his feelings without allowing the reader emotional access, creating a distance that makes it harder to engage with him at the most difficult moments. The relationship between Kyung and Gillian and many of the parent-child relationships are rendered in a series of brief moments of disapproval, resistance, or shame. This is sometimes appropriate but so often repeated that it begins to feel like shorthand. Yun too frequently explains what would have been more effectively described, leaving the book a little flat. Yun's characters don't merely desire walls and a roof, although houses have a powerful and intelligent presence here. A diverse and nuanced cast of characters seeks shelter from pain and loneliness in this valiant portrayal of contemporary American life.

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February 1, 2016
Long before an appalling crime alters the characters' lives in Shelter, Kyung Cho rarely felt safe. Domestic violence riddled his childhood home in a tony suburb of Boston, and financial struggles later strain his life with his wife and young son in a nearby neighborhood. Two failed attempts at increasing security converge menacingly when a real-estate agent sizing up Kyung's house for resale notices a naked, older woman stumbling from the Eden-like woods in the back. This is Kyung's immigrant mother, and she and her household have been brutally attacked. The rest of Yun's skilled, deeply disconcerting debut novel follows an investigation into the origins and legacy of violence. Along with providing deft plot twists, Yun convincingly portrays Kyung's desperate attempts to assimilate, not just as the child of Korean immigrants married to an Irish American but also as a scarred son terrified of parenting his own child. The part of him that wanted to be a good father was constantly at odds with the part that didn't have one. A work of relentless psychological sleuthing and sensitive insight.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

Starred review from January 1, 2016

Faced with financial crisis, college professor Kyung Cho and his wife, Gillian, are considering selling their overmortgaged home. During the initial realtor meeting, the couple discovers Kyung's mother wandering disoriented and naked beyond their backyard. Kyung misunderstands his mother's garbled Korean--the language she reverts to in shock although she's fluent in English--and concludes that she's been battered by his father again. But when he enters his parents' impeccable manse-on-the-hill seeking answers, he's shattered to find that his parents and their housekeeper are the victims of a heinous crime. As the extended Korean Irish American family attempts to reclaim their fractured lives, Kyung's decades-long suppressed rage at his abusive father and submissive mother threatens to destroy any semblance of resolution and recovery. Amid ramshackle houses and pristine abodes, finding true shelter is an elusive challenge for all. VERDICT So wowed was Picador with Yun's debut novel that hundreds of extra galleys were printed to share with colleagues. How prescient indeed, because like Celeste Ng's superlauded best seller, Everything You Never Told Me, also about a dysfunctional mixed-race family's tragedy, this work should find itself on best-of lists, among major award nominations, and in eager readers' hands everywhere. [See Prepub Alert, 9/28/15.]--Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2015

In this blistering novel of family conflict by Yun, South Korea born and North Dakota bred, successful professor Kyung Cho was raised in luxury by unloving parents. When he must take them in, his anger rises hotly. Big in-house love.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2016

Faced with financial crisis, college professor Kyung Cho and his wife, Gillian, are considering selling their overmortgaged home. During the initial realtor meeting, the couple discovers Kyung's mother wandering disoriented and naked beyond their backyard. Kyung misunderstands his mother's garbled Korean--the language she reverts to in shock although she's fluent in English--and concludes that she's been battered by his father again. But when he enters his parents' impeccable manse-on-the-hill seeking answers, he's shattered to find that his parents and their housekeeper are the victims of a heinous crime. As the extended Korean Irish American family attempts to reclaim their fractured lives, Kyung's decades-long suppressed rage at his abusive father and submissive mother threatens to destroy any semblance of resolution and recovery. Amid ramshackle houses and pristine abodes, finding true shelter is an elusive challenge for all. VERDICT So wowed was Picador with Yun's debut novel that hundreds of extra galleys were printed to share with colleagues. How prescient indeed, because like Celeste Ng's superlauded best seller, Everything You Never Told Me, also about a dysfunctional mixed-race family's tragedy, this work should find itself on best-of lists, among major award nominations, and in eager readers' hands everywhere. [See Prepub Alert, 9/28/15.]--Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.