Review by Booklist Review
Striking a balance between stoicism and fervency, The Sisters K pierces into the heart of suffering, delivering a breathtaking debut that questions the ethics, strength, and intimacy of family bonds forged by pain. In a contemplative narrative voice, the novel follows three estranged sisters as they decide how to care for their dying, abusive father, who supposedly has a large estate. Their already differing opinions are complicated by the discovery of an illegitimate brother with potential claims to the inheritance. Sun's novel is a sophisticated study of characters' motivations, including redemption and revenge, and an exploration into the transactional nature of relationships. Herein lies the genius of Sun's writing: an all-encompassing reach into the emotional depths of each character, eliciting the self-contained worldview of each one while also evoking the emotions, such as guilt, that connect them to each other. As she centers suffering as a character of its own, Sun seamlessly maneuvers between dualities, emphasized through her characters' relationships with Korean and English and their expressions of trauma, both lyrical and driven by instinct.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In Sun's inspired debut, three Korean American sisters and their half brother reunite in the present day after learning that their widowed father is terminally ill. The story begins three decades earlier in Los Angeles, where Eugene Kim physically and psychologically abuses his second wife, Jeonghee, and his three daughters, Minah, Sarah, and Esther. Though neighbors frequently call the police, Eugene faces no consequences for the beatings, prompting Minah to realize that his first wife, her birth mother, was also "desperate to escape" when she left years earlier. Now a 34-year-old lawyer who has dedicated her life to upholding the justice that eluded her as a child, Minah hasn't seen Eugene since she left home at 17. Though literature professor Sarah is Eugene's favorite, it's Esther who's the first of the sisters to respond to their father's invitation to visit him in New Jersey after he's diagnosed with cancer. When Edwin, a son Eugene had out of wedlock, makes a surprise arrival, the sisters learn that because of the state's inheritance laws, he may stand to inherit everything. The revelations and reconciliations that ensue make for a fascinating update on the age-old theme of filial piety. Sun marks herself as a writer to watch. Agent: Amelia Atlas, CAA. (June)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A reimagining of The Brothers Karamazov with three Korean American sisters in the titular roles. Minah, Sarah, and Esther Kim are raised under the shadow of their father Eugene's extreme cruelty. The eldest, Minah, was born to a different mother than the younger two, but she's raised alongside them under the insufficient care of their terminally ill mother, Jeonghee, while the girls' father uses her as a target for his frequent rages. After Jeonghee's death, Minah distances herself from her family and eventually becomes a successful lawyer who "feel[s] most spiritual" when putting on makeup or new clothes. Minah plans to extend the sensual joy she takes in the world to the experience of having children and is bending her will toward finding a man who will enable these future plans. Sarah, the middle child and her father's favorite, is brilliant, an Ivy League graduate who finds herself cynically alienated from a society she sees as filled with "suffering and sadism and selfishness." Alone of the sisters, Esther has drifted out into the world without a plan to govern her future decisions, and yet has managed to keep an essential compassion for humanity, including her increasingly abusive father, even through the deprivations of her wanderings. The sisters lose touch as adults, but they're brought back into daily contact when Eugene announces not only that he's dying, but that the Sisters K have a long-lost illegitimate brother whom they must factor into their plans for their eventual inheritance. As the sisters negotiate their philosophical views on pleasure and suffering, rage and shame, duty and freely given love, Sun patiently translates the core values of Dostoevsky's timeless work into the idioms of late capitalism, where the sisters' available identities are refracted through the prism of not one but two paternalistic societies--Korean and American. The result is a book that does far more than retell a classic tale: it constructs a whole new vocabulary to discuss the most central of human conundrums: how to love and be loved in return. A deeply intelligent examination of the ties that both define and bind our lives. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
