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Jane is leaving the Bay Area for NYC to get away from her troubled Korean family. Her father has become a long-distance trucker, her mother feels abandoned though she and her spouse didn't get along, and her older brother, Kevin, is screwing up. In subsequent chapters we get the back story of each, illustrating immigrant demands on their offspring; both Jane and Kevin were driven to compete as pianists and tennis players until they rebelled. Initially I found the characters flat and sad, but as Lee developed the reasons for their actions and their misery, I started to embrace them. I had to look up "han," though I got it in context: a complex, untranslatable concept of deep emotional pain, sorrow and resentment. Illuminating.
Claudia is an expert in blood-spatter testing, and her work is considered the ultimate measurement in forensic science. She's just discovered that it has considerable flaws, and if these were revealed, it would overturn cases and be the end of her career. She's slated to be honored at a prestigious event in London. What to do? A privileged couple was shockingly murdered. The case, unsolved, is closed, but new evidence identifies a possible culprit, so it might be reopened. However, Claudia just lost her lawyer husband in a freakish road accident, and she's petrified that her school-aged children could be at risk since the actual perpetrator is still at large and might attack her family. Mina anatomizes social classes like a forensic scientist herself and tackles moral tangles as well as spinning a captivating yarn. London setting.
Subtitled: Finding My Way Home. Vicky and her husband Joe relocate from LA to a 160-acre ranch in the Wet Mountains of Colorado. It's an attempt to save their troubled marriage which doesn't work. So there she is, a woman alone except for horses, dogs, cows, weather—you name it. She has gumption, humor, and a Buddhist practice, which all see her through those two challenging and rewarding years until it's time to move on. One fascinating wrinkle: she teaches meditation at nearby prisons. This book delivers everything I want on the page: vivid atmosphere and stunning insights that made me feel immediately at home and in very good company. Highly recommended.
This impressionistic, autobiographical novel climbs into our nameless protagonist's life when she was 16 years old. A photographer, K, invites the girl to Paris to model for him. Of course, her mother says no, she's much too young, but the girl prevails. That's how she finds herself utterly lost, forgetting the name of her hotel, no French to speak of, only with K's address scrawled on a piece of paper torn out of a book. Thus starts a heady, confusing stretch of seduction, manipulation, and eventual rejection. Back in Oslo and in subsequent years in NYC, memories of that desperate time still haunt her. I was a wayward teenager, so this book spoke very directly to my murky long-ago experiences, in which I demanded adult privileges but then discovered how cruel the world can be. The author's father is famed film director Igmar Bergman, her mother is film star Liv Ullman, and their daughter is an excellent writer to boot.
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