Shelter

Jung Yun

Book - 2016

"Kyung Cho's home is worth less money than he owes. A tenure-track professor, he and his wife, Gillian, have always lived beyond their means. Now their decisions have caught up with them, and Kyung is anxious for his family's future: all he wants is to provide the home that was denied him to their son. Not that he ever wanted for pleasing things -- his father moved the family from Korea, and made good money engineering patents for the university that now employs his son. Kyung was raised in the town's most affluent neighborhood, in the exquisite house where his parents, Jin and Mae, still live, but his childhood was far from comfortable. Jin was always swift to anger, and whenever he took a hand to Mae, she would inflict... the wounds she suffered on Kyung. With the support of his parents' pastor, Kyung brought the cycle to a halt, but he cannot bear the thought of asking them for help. Yet when Jin and Mae become victims of a violent home invasion, the dynamic suddenly changes, and Kyung is compelled to take them in. As the carefully established distance between Kyung and his parents collapses, he must reckon with his childhood, even as the life that he has built begins to crumble. As Shelter veers swiftly toward its startling conclusion, Jung Yun's debut novel leads us through dark and violent territory, where, unexpectedly, the Chos discover hope. Taut and masterfully told, it as riveting as it is profound"--

Saved in:

1st Floor Show me where

FICTION/Yun Jung
1 / 1 copies available
Location Call Number   Status
1st Floor FICTION/Yun Jung Checked In
Subjects
Genres
Suspense fiction
Published
New York : Picador 2016.
Language
English
Main Author
Jung Yun (-)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
328 pages ; 22 cm
ISBN
9781250075611
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

GHETTO: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea, by Mitchell Duneier. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16.) In contemporary usage, the term "ghetto," freighted with innuendo and negative connotations, has become divorced from its historical context. The idea of a ghetto began in 1500s Venice, when the city relegated its Jews to an island; Rome and other cities in Western Europe followed suit. Duneier traces the way in which comparable forces pushed blacks to the margins in America. THE NIX, by Nathan Hill. (Vintage, $17.) Fringe politics and globecrossing capers figure into this dizzying debut novel. A young English professor with a deadend book project writes instead about his mother, a former leftist radical who abandoned him as a child. Our reviewer, Teddy Wayne, praised Hill's story as "a supersize and audacious novel of American misadventure." ALLIGATOR CANDY: A Memoir, by David Kushner. (Simon & Schuster, $16.) In 1973, when the author was 4, his older brother Jonathan was abducted and murdered; the crime rattled his Florida hometown, and a profound silence settled in his home. Years later, Kushner approached his brother's death as a reporter, digging into news clips and other records to find out more; along with his emotional account of the event itself, he offers a glimpse of the crisis wrought by grief. THE ASSISTANTS, by Camille Perri. (Putnam, $16.) Tina, the assistant to a high-powered media executive in New York, is straining under meager pay and unpaid bills. When the opportunity arises to embezzle the amount needed to pay offher student loan balance - a sum that would pale next to her boss's own spending - she takes it. But when another assistant discovers the fraud, she blackmails Tina into committing the same crime to help her pay offher own debt. DIANE ARBUS: Portrait of a Photographer, by Arthur Lubow. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $17.99.) Drawing on interviews with Arbus's friends and lovers, correspondence and diary entries, Lubow's account of the troubled artist reads like a novel. He chronicles her relatively short career, including the lurid gossip - incest, sexual escapades, mental illness - that swirled around her, while giving her own voice a prominent role in the biography. SHELTER, by Jung Yun. (Picador, $16.) Kyung, a Korean-American, grew up financially comfortable - surrounded by tutors, music lessons and other markers of success - but in loveless, unaffectionate surroundings. Years later, he is struggling to keep his middle-class home when an act of violence leaves his parents, from whom he is largely estranged, unable to remain on their own.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 30, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review

Long before an appalling crime alters the characters' lives in Shelter, Kyung Cho rarely felt safe. Domestic violence riddled his childhood home in a tony suburb of Boston, and financial struggles later strain his life with his wife and young son in a nearby neighborhood. Two failed attempts at increasing security converge menacingly when a real-estate agent sizing up Kyung's house for resale notices a naked, older woman stumbling from the Eden-like woods in the back. This is Kyung's immigrant mother, and she and her household have been brutally attacked. The rest of Yun's skilled, deeply disconcerting debut novel follows an investigation into the origins and legacy of violence. Along with providing deft plot twists, Yun convincingly portrays Kyung's desperate attempts to assimilate, not just as the child of Korean immigrants married to an Irish American but also as a scarred son terrified of parenting his own child. The part of him that wanted to be a good father was constantly at odds with the part that didn't have one. A work of relentless psychological sleuthing and sensitive insight.--Alessio, Carolyn Copyright 2016 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In her intense debut, Jung explores the powerful legacy of familial violence and the difficulty of finding the strength and grace to forgive. As the novel opens, Kyung Cho and his wife, Gillian, are on the verge of financial calamity: they are deep in debt, and selling their house in suburban Boston won't help-their mortgage is underwater. Just when Gillian has almost convinced Kyung to swallow his pride and move in with his wealthy parents, Kyung learns that his parents have been the victims of a brutal home invasion. In an instant, Kyung must decide whether to find room in his home (and his heart) for his traumatized parents. Doing so, however, requires him to bridge the distance he's deliberately maintained from them, to overcome the resentment he bears toward his parents for his unhappy childhood and his persistent feelings of failure. As Kyung's situation grows increasingly unstable, he finds himself lapsing into familiar patterns of anger, distrust, and violence. Despite some lengthy asides, especially in the novel's first half, that threaten to drown the narrative momentum in emotional reflection, a lot happens in this family drama rife with tension and unexpected ironies. Kyung's greatest struggle, in the end, is learning how to see not only his own life but also his parents' with clarity and understanding. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Faced with financial crisis, college professor Kyung Cho and his wife, Gillian, are considering selling their overmortgaged home. During the initial realtor meeting, the couple discovers Kyung's mother wandering disoriented and naked beyond their backyard. Kyung misunderstands his mother's garbled Korean-the language she reverts to in shock although she's fluent in English-and concludes that she's been battered by his father again. But when he enters his parents' impeccable manse-on-the-hill seeking answers, he's shattered to find that his parents and their housekeeper are the victims of a heinous crime. As the extended Korean Irish American family attempts to reclaim their fractured lives, Kyung's decades-long suppressed rage at his abusive father and submissive mother threatens to destroy any semblance of resolution and recovery. Amid ramshackle houses and pristine abodes, finding true shelter is an elusive challenge for all. Verdict So wowed was Picador with Yun's debut novel that hundreds of extra galleys were printed to share with colleagues. How prescient indeed, because like Celeste Ng's superlauded best seller, Everything You Never Told Me, also about a dysfunctional mixed-race family's tragedy, this work should find itself on best-of lists, among major award nominations, and in eager readers' hands everywhere. [See Prepub Alert, 9/28/15.]-Terry Hong, -Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A fluidly written debut novel that explores violence and its effects on one immigrant family. Education, marriage, and suburban comfort can't protect second-generation Korean-American Kyung Cho from his pastor his futurein Yun's layered, sometimes surprising debut. Kyung's 4-year-old son is difficult, his job unsatisfying, his marriage strained. The family finances are disastrous. Kyung and his wife, Gillian, are finally forced to consider renting out their home and moving in with his distant and disapproving parents. But even as they chat with the real estate agent, their world is turned upside down: Mae, Kyung's mother, is walking toward the house, naked and battered. The events that follow move smoothly through time as Kyung struggles with buried traumas while desperately trying to respond to fresh ones. Yun's plotting is muscular; when another writer might have started to wind down, she offers unexpected developments, making for a sophisticated story that maintains its narrative momentum right to the end. On the other hand, Kyung's character can be frustratingly one-dimensional. Yun often anatomizes his feelings without allowing the reader emotional access, creating a distance that makes it harder to engage with him at the most difficult moments. The relationship between Kyung and Gillian and many of the parent-child relationships are rendered in a series of brief moments of disapproval, resistance, or shame. This is sometimes appropriate but so often repeated that it begins to feel like shorthand. Yun too frequently explains what would have been more effectively described, leaving the book a little flat. Yun's characters don't merely desire walls and a roof, although houses have a powerful and intelligent presence here. A diverse and nuanced cast of characters seeks shelter from pain and loneliness in this valiant portrayal of contemporary American life. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.