I found this book on the discount shelves of a local used book store.

MAN ASIAN LITERARY PRIZE WINNER

When sixty-nine-year-old So-nyo is separated from her husband among the crowds of the Seoul subway station, her family begins a desperate search to find her. Yet as long-held secrets and private sorrows begin to reveal themselves, they are forced to wonder: how well did they actually know the woman they called Mom?

Told through the piercing voices and urgent perspectives of a daughter, son, husband, and mother, Please Look After Mom is at once an authentic picture of contemporary life in Korea and a universal story of family love.

Mailed as a Random Act of BookCrossing Kindness to another BookCrosser in North Carolina. It was on their Wish List.
Wish? Did somebody say "Wish"?



Mekka-lekka-hai, mekka-hiney-ho!
Mekka-lekka-hai, mekka-channi-ho!
The wish has been granted.
Long live Jambi!

Received in yesterday's mail. Thank you, buttonbright (or should I thank your genie?), for the kind RABCK! Not sure when I'll get this one read but it is safe on Mt. TBR until that time.

ETA 9-29-17: Promised to GoryDetails in the Wish List Tag game.

This was an interesting book, with lots of voices exploring the impact of a woman whose life is only home and children. The oddest one was the "ghostly" voice of the mother herself - that section seemed strange and a bit out of place, but did provide information that would be difficult to present otherwise. The mother may have led an unremarkable life but she impacted all of her children and set them off into the larger world to make their marks!

The book arrived safely today; many thanks for the tag!

Later: I found the story intriguing from the beginning, with its look at the disappearance of "Mom", who got separated from her husband on a busy train platform when the couple was visiting the city, and has not been seen since... The differing narrators provide alternate views of the main characters, their relationships, and some of the family secrets - a running theme is that the adult children didn't really know their mother as anything but "mom". There were very poignant bits - that Mom was illiterate (making her misadventure at the train station even scarier; a rather timid, past-middle-age country-mouse lost in the big city and unable to read the signs!), that she donated to an orphange in exchange for having her author-daughter's works read to her, and so on. But by the time the story ended (with a frustrating lack of resolution as to Mom's fate, though there are hints in the mom-viewpoint section), I felt manipulated; there were true-feeling sections that did resonate with me, but there were some heavy-handed ones as well. The unusual and adventurous stylistic choices were interesting; the family-dynamics, not quite so much.

I plan to leave this book on a bench in the Alewife MBTA station some time today; hope the finder enjoys it!

[See other recent releases in MA here.]

*** Released for the 2018 Keep Them Moving release challenge. ***

*** Released for the 2018 Mothers Day release challenge. ***