The Stone Home

Starred review from February 19, 2024
Kim’s riveting sophomore novel (after If You Leave Me) begins in 2011 with 40-something Eunju Oh receiving an unexpected visitor at her apartment in Daegu, South Korea. Narae, a 30-year-old Korean American woman raised in New York City by Eunju’s recently deceased childhood enemy, Sangchul Kim, has come in search of the truth about her familial origins. What follows is an account from both teenaged Eunju’s and Sangchul’s perspectives of their year in the Stone House three decades earlier. Billed by the government as a rehabilitation center for wayward youth and women, the Stone House instead operated as a forced-labor camp where innocent civilians kidnapped by the police were enslaved under grueling conditions. The hair-raising narrative chronicles Eunju’s time in the camp’s kitchen with her mother and a disparate group of women who came to care for one another. Her first run-in with Sangchul occurs at a camp picnic, and they become friends after Eunju is chosen to work with Sangchul and some other boys to thread fishhooks. As Eunju recounts to Narae, Sangchul became a brutal enforcer for the camp’s sadistic leaders. Through the suspenseful and nuanced frame narrative, Eunju unearths the full story behind Sangchul’s chilling betrayal and reveals the truth about Narae’s birth mother. Kim generates empathy for all the characters by showing the anguish and desperation that drive their harrowing deeds. This confirms Kim’s reputation as a formidable talent.

March 1, 2024
Kim (If You Leave Me, 2018) transforms an ignominious slice of modern Korean history into a mesmerizing exploration of family bonds repeatedly tested by tortuous circumstances. In May 1980, 15-year-old Eunju and her mother are arrested for begging. Teen brothers Youngchul and Sangchul were captured outside their neighborhood mart, falsely accused of theft. They are all sent to the Stone Home, where their lives briefly intersect. It's an alleged rehabilitation center for Korea's undesirables, who are to be retrained and returned to society as productive citizens. In reality, it's a penitentiary, sanctioned by a militarized government determined to banish the unwanted and unhoused in preparation for South Korea's unveiling as an international powerhouse rising from the ashes of war to welcome the world for the 1988 Olympics. Eunju and Umma are assigned to Little House, where women are taught to obey and serve the boys and men. The brothers live in Big House, work brutal hours, and attempt to survive the treacherous hierarchies of violent abuse. Thirty years later, an American stranger finds Eunju wielding a symbolic knife that literally cuts open their conjoined past. Deftly traversing decades and viewpoints as Eunju and Sangchul alternately reveal their fates, Kim's second novel is a wrenching, haunting read as her breathtaking storytelling provides indelible testimony to witness and behold.

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April 1, 2024
In the spring of 1980, two pairs of Korean citizens are abducted, their lives forever entwined. The police snatch up Eunju, 15, and her mother, a young sex worker, as they beg for money in the street. Sangchul and his older brother, both teenagers, are kidnapped by the authorities on their way home from school. In alternating chapters, Eunju and Sangchul reveal the story of their lives at the Stone Home, an institution that's charged with rehabilitating vagrants into model citizens during a volatile time for Korean politics and the nation's place on the world's stage. What really happens is that the two men who run the facility, known only as Warden and Teacher, force their charges into labor, brutal punishments when they don't meet quotas, vicious physical abuse, and specious religious services. They establish a demeaning pecking order, especially among the boys, that unleashes cruelties among them. The story also unfolds piece by piece in 2011 when Narae, a 30-something Korean American, shows up on Eunju's doorstep in Daegu. Sangchul was Narae's father, and his dying wish was for Narae to find Eunju, now in her mid-40s, to learn the truth about the past. Kim has written such a poignant, heartfelt book that the only disappointment is a sense of missed opportunity. By relying on fragments, clipped sentences, and vague descriptions, Kim too often sacrifices clarity for lyricism, particularly in the first half of the book. When she's willing to tell this story of torment more plainly, narrating the action of the second half with more direct language, it ignites into a searing portrait of survival. A novel that explores how the historical moment and the nature of power shape our lives.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

March 29, 2024

Kim was named a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 in 2022, and her debut, If You Leave Me, was chosen as a best book of the year by over a dozen publications. Now she tells a dual-timeline coming-of-age story that begins in the 1980s with a young girl and her mother in a South Korean reformatory center. With a 100K-copy first printing. Prepub Alert.

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