THE LAST STORY OF MINA LEE (on sale: September 1, 2020; Park Row Books; Hardcover; $27.99 US/ $34.99 CAN). opens when Margot Lee’s mother, Mina, doesn’t return her calls. It’s a mystery to twenty-six-year-old Margot, until she visits her childhood apartment in Koreatown, Los Angeles, and finds that her mother has suspiciously died. The discovery sends Margot digging through the past, unraveling the tenuous and invisible strings that held together her single mother’s life as a Korean War orphan and an undocumented immigrant, only to realize how little she truly knew about her mother.

Interwoven with Margot’s present-day search is Mina’s story of her first year in Los Angeles as she navigates the promises and perils of the American myth of reinvention. While she’s barely earning a living by stocking shelves at a Korean grocery store, the last thing Mina ever expects is to fall in love. But that love story sets in motion a series of events that have consequences for years to come, leading up to the truth of what happened the night of her death.

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In this book we start out with Margot going back to California to help her friend move as well as see her mother, but she’s been very worried as her mother has not picked up the phone and we very quickly find out that it’s because her mother has died.

From there on the book is dual perspective, with us learning Mina’s history in one perspective and Margot digging up information about her mother that she never knew. It’s a very heart wrenching story about family, what it’s like to be a Korean immigrant and what it’s like to be a child of one. There was so much to unpack with this story and I felt that for the most part the author really succeeded.

The writing style was absolutely beautiful and I really enjoyed the flow and cadence of Kim’s writing. For a debut this was really solid and I look forward to seeing what else she writes.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Nancy Jooyoun Kim is a graduate of UCLA and the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, The Rumpus, Electric Literature, Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s The Margins, The Offing, the blogs of Prairie Schooner and Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Her essay, “Love (or Live Cargo),” was performed for NPR/PRI’s Selected Shorts in 2017 with stories by Viet Thanh Nguyen, Phil Klay, and Etgar Keret. THE LAST STORY OF MINA LEE is her first novel.

Social Links | Author Website | Twitter: @njooyounkim |
Instagram: @njooyounkim | Goodreads

Happy reading!