Blog Tour – Review: “The Last Story of Mina Lee” by Nancy Jooyoun Kim
About The Book
Synopsis: THE LAST STORY OF MINA LEE (on sale: September 1, 2020; Park Row Books; Hardcover; $27.99 US/ $34.99 CAN). opens when Margot Lee’s mother, Mina, doesn’t return her calls. It’s a mystery to twenty-six-year-old Margot, until she visits her childhood apartment in Koreatown, Los Angeles, and finds that her mother has suspiciously died. The discovery sends Margot digging through the past, unraveling the tenuous and invisible strings that held together her single mother’s life as a Korean War orphan and an undocumented immigrant, only to realize how little she truly knew about her mother.
Interwoven with Margot’s present-day search is Mina’s story of her first year in Los Angeles as she navigates the promises and perils of the American myth of reinvention. While she’s barely earning a living by stocking shelves at a Korean grocery store, the last thing Mina ever expects.
Harlequin | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Powell’s | Books-A-Million
Review
The Last Story of Mina Lee follows Margot who is on her own way back home only to be struck with instant grief. Mina’s mother has passed and Margot struggles to grasp with her death. She loved her mother and feels deep regret that she wasn’t able to spend more time with her. The story alternates between Mina’s point-of-view of her past, when she started out in America, and trying to adapt to a new life. The present day follows Margot picking up pieces of her mom’s life and trying learn more about her.
In Mina’s view we get to experience her overwhelming culture shock and trying to navigate life in America. Everything is so new to her and she struggles to grasp new customs and the language. She tries to make new connections while dealing with the grief of her husband and daughter. Margot’s narrative focuses on her becoming her own detective into her mother’s past and tries to learn more about her. There was a part of her life that was secret to Margot’s and she wants to piece together her mother’s last moments. On her journey she discovers the life that her mom left behind while reconciling with her own past.
This can be heavy book at times but I really enjoyed the interwoven narrative of mother and daughter:
“Perhaps, despite the distances between them, the differences in their experiences as a mother and a daughter, as individuals, as women of a certain time and place, what had made them a family was not simply blood but never fully giving up on each other.”
Mina embraces Korean culture while Margot strives to fit in and be more American is one of driving forces for a split in their relationship. Their lives seems so different at the beginning of the book but they share many things in common. All the main character are dealing with grief, traumatic pasts, and striving to look towards a clearer future, but obstacles keep getting in the way. I also appreciated the discussions of family, culture, and immigration.
This was a fantastic debut novel with a powerful narrative!
Final Verdict:
About The Author
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Nancy Jooyoun Kim is a graduate of UCLA and the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, The Rumpus, Electric Literature, Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s The Margins, The Offing, the blogs of Prairie Schooner and Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Her essay, “Love (or Live Cargo),” was performed for NPR/PRI’s Selected Shorts in 2017 with stories by Viet Thanh Nguyen, Phil Klay, and Etgar Keret. THE LAST STORY OF MINA LEE is her first novel.
