The Last Story of Mina Lee: the Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick

You think you know your parents, you grow up knowing everything they do, their loves, likes and dislikes, how they live their lives....but what if that was only the tip of the iceberg, what if they’d lived a whole other life that you had no idea about?Margot Lee has been trying to get in touch with her mother, as she has failed to answer her calls, she decides a surprise visit is in order and whilst on a trip to LA from her home in Seattle she stops to visit her mother Mina. She is devastated to find her mother’s body, fearing that there was foul play involved she starts looking in to her mother’s life and discovers a whole side to Mina that she didn’t know existed and finds out just how she touched the lives of the people around her.Now I’ve probably made that sound like a murder mystery, its not, the story flits between two time lines we have Mina, Margot’s mother arriving in LA from South Korea in the 80’s and the story of how she came to be in the States and how she starts her new life, we follow her as she makes friends, finds work in a Korean supermarket and how she finds love. We also have the story of Margot and the aftermath of finding Mina’s body and her quest to find out more about Mina’s life.The story is very well done, sometimes going backwards and forwards in time can spoil a story for me, especially if you don’t particularly care for one timeline but here it worked perfectly. It was a little slow to start with but once it got going I found the story sucked me in, so many lives ended up being intertwined, I needed to know how it would be resolved. The Last Story of Mina Lee really was a superb read.Thanks to Net Galley for providing me with a copy in exchange for an honest review.

A tender exploration of belonging which focuses on Koreans living in America.When Margot Lee drives a friend to LA, she wants to pop in and see her single mother, Mina, who hasn’t been answering her calls. When Margot arrives at the apartment, she finds her mother has tragically died and whilst it looks like an accident, there are a few things which Margot thinks worth exploring, like the newspaper cutting of a strangers obituary which her mother has hidden in a drawer. This leads Margot to uncover all the secrets and tragedies of her mother’s life, which until that point she had been so ashamed of.Whilst I must admit that this story didn’t grip me in the way I had hoped, I did love how intricately woven the stories of Margot today, and Mina when she first moved to America were, and how Margot moves from shame and disgust about her mother at the beginning to understanding and compassion by the end. There were some very relatable subjects, like the way Margot has become stuck in an office job out of necessity rather than pursue her passions, and the shame Margot felt about her mother as a young girl, and I loved the parallels drawn between the two - Margot visiting the same Ferris wheel her mother had decades before, for example.There was a real power to the way Mina describes trying to fit in as an immigrant in America, and her refusal to learn English when Americans refuse to embrace her as part of their country - it feels so important to have stories like this right now, and Kim has done a brilliant job of telling the story in a gentle yet impactful way.

This incredible story is told from the points of view of Mina and her daughter Margot from two different timelines, however this very much remains Mina’s story. We are introduced to Mina Lee back in 1987 as she hesitantly steps off a plane into LA airport to start a new life in Koreatown after suffering so much tragedy in Seoul that she describes it as being like a graveyard to her. She has rented a room in an apartment block and she soon finds work at a Korean supermarket.We meet her daughter American born Margot in Fall 2014 as she is helping her friend Miguel relocate from Seattle to LA. She is also using this as a chance to check in on her mom, whom she hasn’t been able to contact for two weeks, and because the last time she actually saw her was the previous Christmas. Sadly as Margot arrives at her mom’s flat she discovers that she has died, lying undiscovered for a few days, in what looks like an accidental fall. But as Margot is sorting through her mother’s belongings, she starts to become suspicious about the circumstances surrounding her death. There is a real air of suspense about the story as Margot goes in search of the truth and she comes to realise that there is a lot she didn’t know or understand about her mother.Mina raised Margot alone, but despite this there is a terrible disconnect between them. There was a huge language and cultural barrier between the two and Margot spent her older childhood being ashamed of her mother’s language, their home and their poverty. It was fascinating to read about the complexities of this mother/daughter relationship and warming to see Margot slowly starting to feel more emotion and empathy for her mother, as she learned more about her life and their family history.I thought that this was such a beautifully written and sad story. Mina’s life and the pain and suffering she had to endure, from the devastating effects of the Korean war to the harsh realities of life in America as a Korean immigrant, was truly heartbreaking. As Mina says, she worked so hard for so little with the constant fear of deportation hanging over her. She lived a very lonely life and simply worked to survive.Food was a big part of this story and I was tempted by all the mouthwatering descriptions of traditional Korean cuisine. such as banchan, kimchi jjigae and doenjang. The food was like a comfort blanket for Mina when she arrived in America and it was used to show love and affection in many different ways throughout the book as well as adding to the whole cultural vibe of the story.I thoroughly enjoyed The Last Story of Mina Lee, I think this is a stunning debut novel. I adored the author’s voice and writing style whilst the descriptive and emotive language, and analogies were absolutely beautiful. I highly recommend this book and I will definitely be looking out for more of Nancy Jooyoun Kim’s work.