29 Aug / Concerning My Daughter by Kim Hye-jin, translated by Jamie Chang [in Booklist]
*STARRED REVIEW
Already a prestigious bestseller in Korea, Kim Hye-jin’s impassioned novel about the meaning of family – by blood, by choice – marks her English-language debut, seamlessly translated by National Book Award longlister Jamie Chang. A mother is desperate to help her thirtysomething daughter, an itinerant college lecturer who can’t seem to make ends meet. All she has left to offer is her home, and so daughter Green and her partner Lane move in.
The woman has been “a good person” all her life, but she can’t accept Green and Lane’s lesbian relationship, even though it’s already seven years strong. Although she’s “past seventy,” the woman must still work, currently as a caregiver to Jen, a once internationally renowned activist suffering from dementia who is now completely alone and discarded. That lonely fate, the woman fears, might be her own.
Sandwiched between tormented maternity and looming mortality, Kim’s protagonist must find a way to make peace with her debilitating guilt and shame. In an unintended reminder of change, progress, and hope, translator Chang’s bio, appearing at the book’s close, states “She lives in Korea with her wife and dog.”
Kim’s confessional first-person narration expresses the sense of urgency to unburden one’s most vulnerable thoughts and longings. Readers willing to become intimate witnesses will be rewarded with a resonating and empathic tale.
Review: “Fiction,” Booklist, August 2022
Readers: Adult
Published: 2017 (Korea), 2022 (United States)