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Book Reviewed by:In the wake of the police shooting of a black teenager, Los Angeles is as tense as it's been since the unrest of the early 1990s.
But Grace Park and Shawn Matthews have their own problems. Grace is sheltered and largely oblivious, living in the Valley with her Korean-immigrant parents, working long hours at the family pharmacy. She's distraught that her sister hasn't spoken to their mother in two years, for reasons beyond Grace's understanding. Shawn has already had enough of politics and protest after an act of violence shattered his family years ago. He just wants to be left alone to enjoy his quiet life in Palmdale.
But when another shocking crime hits LA, both the Park and Matthews families are forced to face down their history while navigating the tumult of a city on the brink of more violence.
The walls between victim and shooter dissolve as the story develops. Cha effectively captures the nuances, because rather than vilifying either party, she accounts for the struggles, moral ambiguities and motivations of each character. Still, she does not deflect from the racism and classism of the past and present, refusing to deny the awful truths that people often choose to ignore to make sense of what happens to them. In this way, she crafts a story that is potent with honesty and urgency...continued
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(Reviewed by Jamie Chornoby).
In Your House Will Pay, one of author Steph Cha's characters is a gregarious, astute journalist called Jules Searcey, who is known for writing about issues related to political and racial dissent. He penned a breakthrough book based on his reporting called Farewell Waltz: The Life and Death of Ava Matthews, which covered the murder of a young, bright Black girl killed during the 1992 riots in Los Angeles. Since Ava was a talented musician, Searcey titled the book after a piano piece—Frédéric Chopin's Waltz in A-flat major, op. 69, no. 1, more commonly known as the Farewell Waltz.
Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849) is widely considered the greatest Polish composer and a maestro pianist. His talents flourished early on;...
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Steph Cha has taken a dark moment in Los Angeles's violent history and cracked it wide open, creating a prism of understanding...A touching portrait of two families bound together by a split-second decision that tore a hole through an entire city.
