The Lucky Gourd Shop: A Novel
Joanna Scott's richly imaginedThe Lucky Gourd Shopbegins in  America, where the adoptive mother of three Korean children tries to find out  more  about their pasts. But where she fails, we succeed; the rest of the novel takes  us back a generation, to a South Korea ravaged by years of poverty and war.  There we meet Mi Sook--orphan, independent spirit, and, as soon becomes clear,  the children's birth mother. Found abandoned in an alley and raised like a stray  in the back room of a coffee shop, Mi Sook grows up pretty, bubbly, and happy  enough,  but still "that rare creature in her society, one who did not draw her sense of  self  from fixed relationships with others." In South Korea, of course, to be without  fixed relationships--to be withoutfamily--is to live in a dangerous  limbo, and soon enough Mi Sook finds trouble. Throughout the events that follow,  Scott's powerful narrative voice never fails to convince. In her telling, this  is a story without villains; even the violent husband is no monster when we  learn the intense economic and cultural pressures with which he struggles. More  to the point, it's also a story without victims; as in all great works of  literature, Scott's characters are made of flesh and blood, capable of agency  and action and especially mistakes. This first novel succeeds on a number of  levels, as an imaginative leap between nations and generations and as a snapshot  of a culture in transition. Most of all, however,The Lucky Gourd Shopis  a precise, affecting, and unsentimental portrait of Mi Sook herself, of  hardships endured without knowing they're hardships and choices that are  scarcely choices at all.--Chloe Byrne