A Reese's Book Club Pick
by Nancy Jooyoun Kim
A profoundly moving and unconventional mother-daughter saga, The Last Story of Mina Lee illustrates the devastating realities of being an immigrant in America.
Margot Lee's mother, Mina, isn't returning her calls. It's a mystery to twenty-six-year-old Margot, until she visits her childhood apartment in Koreatown, LA, and finds that her mother has suspiciously died. The discovery sends Margot digging through the past, unraveling the tenuous 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 is to fall in love. But that love story sets in motion a series of events that have consequences for years to come, leading up to the truth of what happened the night of her death.
Told through the intimate lens of a mother and daughter who have struggled all their lives to understand each other, The Last Story of Mina Lee is a powerful and exquisitely woven debut novel that explores identity, family, secrets, and what it truly means to belong.
"Haunting and heartbreaking, troubled threads between a mother and daughter blend together in a delicate and rich weave… With both sadness and beauty, [Kim] describes grief, regret, loss, and the feeling of being left behind. Fans of Amy Tan and Kristin Hannah will love Kim's brilliant debut." —Booklist (starred review)
"Kim has a gift for page-turning plot.... A moving tale of a mother and daughter finding each other, a reunion made all the more poignant by coming too late." —Seattle Times
"Suspenseful and deeply felt, The Last Story of Mina Lee begins when Margot Lee discovers her mother's death before reeling back in time to explore the secrets that divided Mina and Margot—as well as those that bound them together. Nancy Jooyoun Kim's debut artfully explores a diverse range of immigrant experiences, the meaning of family and home, and the nature of language—how it can be an ocean that divides, or a bridge that connects. In the process, The Last Story of Mina Lee raises questions about the reality of the American dream and illuminates stories that often go untold, in life as well as fiction." —Chloe Benjamin, New York Times bestselling author of The Immortalists
"In The Last Story of Mina Lee, Nancy Jooyoun Kim explores with tenderness and grace the intricate web of guilt, love and secrecy that entangles a mother and daughter. Powerful and poignant, this riveting novel speaks to the complexities of the immigration experience while keeping the reader enthralled by the mystery of the mother's suspicious death." —Jean Kwok, New York Times bestselling author of Searching for Sylvie Lee
This information about The Last Story of Mina Lee was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Nancy Jooyoun Kim is the New York Times bestselling author of What We Kept to Ourselves and The Last Story of Mina Lee, a Reese's Book Club pick. Born and raised in Los Angeles, she now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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