Review by Booklist Review
As a famous therapist, Haesoo believes she can help people because of the total control she has over her emotions. But in the aftermath of a tragic incident, she finds herself losing everything she cared about. Alone and unemployed, she drifts through her daily routine: she wakes up, eats late, does chores, and before dinner, writes letters to different people on her mind. Haesoo never finishes or sends these letters, often throwing them away during her evening walks. One night, she spots an injured stray cat named Turnip. The cat is skittish and resistant to being fed, but Haesoo finds an unexpected companion in fourth-grader Sei when the two unintentionally meet while scattering cat treats for Turnip. Haesoo gets to know the girl and the cat and finds their camaraderie helping her even more than she realizes. Kim's (Concerning My Daughter, 2022) beautifully introspective novel thoughtfully explores the time it takes to process difficult experiences and the restoration that can happen when people open up to each other without expectation.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Kim (Central Station) returns with a subtle and effective parable about the consequences of cancel culture. After South Korean therapist Haesoo Lim appears on a TV program to criticize a famous unnamed actor for irresponsible behavior, the actor commits suicide. Blamed for the tragedy, Haesoo finds her reputation, career, and marriage ruined. Years later, she and others who appeared on the show are still hounded in public, and subjected to internet trolling, cyberbullying, and doxing. She spends her reclusive life drafting but never sending letters to the reporter who first denounced her in print, a younger colleague whom she felt betrayed by, and others. While going for a walk one evening she encounters an injured and hungry street cat she names Turnip. The next evening, she befriends Sei, a kind but awkward fourth-grade schoolgirl whose parents are separated and who is being bullied by her dodgeball teammates. Kim does not offer pat solutions or mawkish sentimentality; rather, Haesoo's attempts to care for Sei and Turnip provide a framework for her defensiveness and self-pity to give way to atonement and healing. The result is an appealing meditation on personal and professional ethics. (Mar.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A "canceled" public figure is thrown back on herself and what remains of her once-successful life, befriended only by a stray cat and a lost little girl. In this near-weightless tale of the heaviness of living, Haesoo Lim, a former psychotherapist and regular TV guest, walks the nighttime streets of her South Korean town, lost in a fog of confusion after the disintegration of her marriage and the ending of her career. After her (scripted) negative comment about a popular actor is held responsible for the man's suicide, public opinion turns against her. Passing through her local park's cones of streetlight and more-soothing shadows, Haesoo carries with her a letter she will never mail, destined, like others she's written to various people in her life, for the park's garbage can. Haesoo's story is revealed to us remotely, tentatively, akin to the way she herself moves around the neighborhood and to the way many of the block's frightened street cats eye her. One scruffy orange cat in particular piques her interest. It's been named Turnip by a local child, 10-year-old Sei, who befriends Haesoo. Gradually, the reality of Sei's empty home life brushes up against Haesoo's sad wanderings, which in turn brush up against Turnip's struggle for survival: a triangle of characters locked into each other's fate, each looking for relief, for a lasting home. Melancholy and ruminative yet possessed of a quiet energy, Kim's tale leads Haesoo toward the realization that, more often than not, what we yearn to be is who we already are, that life is less a matter of becoming than of revealing. While her lawyer flatly tells her that one can't trust people, that "kindness is the first to go when luck changes," Haesoo reaffirms to herself a truth she has known for some time as a counselor: Goodness and growth are impossible "without leaning on kindness and empathy." Despite everything, she has not lost, and must not lose, this faith. A simple, moving story of outcasts coming together. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
