There a Petal Silently Falls: Three Stories by Ch'oe Yun (Weatherhead Books on Asia)
Starred Review. Stories within stories unfold in the title novella: a brother disappears, a mother grieves, a daughter witnesses her mother's death; consequent traumatic events leave the daughter self-destructive. The novella is haunting, painful and affirming, full of illusions and hallucinations while rooted in the graphically physical. In Whisper Yet, a woman's thoughts about her daughter alternate with a story from her own childhood that she's never told anyone before, a device through which three generations and two Koreas coexist. In The Thirteen-Scent Flower, the world is one that slides deftly from fable to satire as a truck driver who dreams of becoming a denizen of the Arctic crosses paths with a suicidal teenage girl with a preternaturally green thumb. Everything about Yun's work is brilliant.(May)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.