-
Access Our
Best Book Club
Books of 2025!
Summary | Excerpt | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
Book Reviewed by:An exquisite collection from a breathtaking new voice - centered on a constellation of Korean American families.
A long-married couple is forced to confront their friend's painful past when a church revival comes to a nearby town...A woman in an arranged marriage struggles to connect with the son she hid from her husband for years...A well-meaning sister unwittingly reunites an abuser with his victims.
Through an indelible array of lives, Yoon Choi explores where first and second generations either clash or find common ground, where meaning falls in the cracks between languages, where relationships bend under the weight of tenderness and disappointment, where displacement turns to heartbreak.
Skinship is suffused with a profound understanding of humanity and offers a searing look at who the people we love truly are.
The stories present a sweeping view of Yoon's characters, so though we're with them for only a few pages, the depth of the flashbacks and backstories are so illuminating, it feels as if she's giving us unlimited access to them. Choi's stories are built up on small moments, constructed upon a frame of tiny potent instances that she tends to with careful, laborious detail. In "A Map of the Simplified World," a young child's crucial moment of change occurs when she slightly betrays her friend. That moment doesn't come out of context; it is borne of the progression of many other small moments of development, of a person's subtle becoming...continued
Full Review
(618 words)
This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access,
become a member today.
(Reviewed by Tasneem Pocketwala).
"Skinship" is a term commonly used to describe physical affection in Korean culture. It can be read as a portmanteau of the words "skin" and "kinship." In the eponymous story from her book Skinship, Yoon Choi puts a different spin on the word's agreed meaning and uses it in an unexpected way. In the last scenes, instead of any kind of loving touch, physical contact in the form of violence becomes the turning point in a dysfunctional family's dynamics, and eventually their fate.
"Skinship" may have its origins as an English-derived, Japanese-coined word, and can refer to the bond through touch between mother and child. It has also come to generally describe bonding through physical contact that takes the form of carefree touching, ...
This "beyond the book" feature is available to non-members for a limited time. Join today for full access.
If you liked Skinship, try these:
The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On
by Franny Choi
Published 2023
From acclaimed poet Franny Choi comes a poetry collection for the ends of worlds—past, present, and future. Choi's third book features poems about historical and impending apocalypses, alongside musings on our responsibilities to each other and visions for our collective survival.
Spider Love Song and Other Stories
by Nancy Au
Published 2019
Nancy Au's debut collection is rich with scents, sounds, imaginative leaps, and unexpected angles of vision.
.gif)
The good writer, the great writer, has what I have called the three S's: The power to see, to sense, and to say. ...
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Adam Johnson
Think Alice Munro. Think Tobias Wolff. Think Lucia Berlin. Yoon Choi is a writer whose talents must be measured on the Richter Scale. The eight rich stories in this debut collection Skinship send tremors through our sensibilities, forcing us to reimagine the bonds that secure families, marriages, and generations. The rolling cadence of Choi's prose—at turns lovely, wise, and funny—releases her characters' voices to speak the truth of lives they'd likely never have otherwise been able to share. And what lives they are. Skinship charts the underlying power and deep humanity of those remanded to be bodega owners' wives, arranged brides, hospice workers, and caretakers, all with inner realms that cascade forth under Choi's careful gaze.
