Stout's Anna is everyone who has been haunted by disconnection and doubt. As we share her journey in this fine first effort, we grow. When we leave her, we are wiser. At the book's beginning, Anna is living in Vermont with her Korean mother and her Boston Irish father. Dad is practically invisible for the purposes of the novel, wallpaper behind the family action.
Mother is a far more formidable character.
Musical, proper, driven and repressed, she carries the culture of Korea, but silently. She longs for lost glory and vanished relatives, but cannot bring herself to reach out to the modern East to find either. Most of all, she is incapable of forging a connection with her daughter that will regenerate her lost sense of identity. Anna, as a teen, is uninquisitive about Korea, turned off by snacks of toasted seaweed and repulsed by her mother's coldness. Only the unexpected arrival of her uncle, Hong-do, sparks an inkling of curiosity.