The San Francisco Chronicle
"Koh’s book is a tremendous gift. . . . A wonder."
5
1
14.05
In Stock
Overview
A tale of deep bonds to family, place, language?of hard-won selfhood told by a singular, incandescent voice.
After living in America for over a decade, Eun Ji's parents return to Korea for work, leaving fifteen-year-old Eun Ji and her brother behind in the family's new California home. Overnight, Eun Ji finds herself in a world made strange in her mother's absence. Her mother writes letters over the years seeking forgiveness and love?letters Eun Ji cannot understand until she finds them years later hidden in a box.
The letters lay bare the impact of her mother's departure, as Eun Ji gets to know the woman who raised her and left her behind. Eun Ji is a student, a traveler, a dancer, a poet, and a daughter coming to terms not only with her parents' prolonged absence, but her family's history: her grandmother's Jun's years as a lovesick wife in Daejeon, the horrors her grandmother Kumiko witnessed during the Jeju Island Massacre. Where, Koh asks, do the stories of our mothers and grandmothers end and ours begin? How do we find words?in Korean, Japanese, English, or any language?to articulate the profound ways that distance can shape love?
The Magical Language of Others is a fearless and poetic mind grappling with forgiveness, reconciliation, legacy, and intergenerational trauma?conjuring an epic saga and love story between mothers and daughters spanning four generations.
Editorial Reviews
Amanda Toronto
"It’s really beautiful. . . . A compassionate, vulnerable, sad, and loving book about mother-daughter relationships. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since I read it."
Shawn Wong
"Give yourself over to her narrative territory and the resetting of the borders of lineage, language, and lives lost."
The Stranger
"A cinematic and multigenerational saga."
The Star Tribune
"A haunting, gorgeous narrative that is lonely but lushly told. . . . Brilliant."
Alexander Chee
"Stunning."
Book Riot
"Powerful. . . . Koh’s success as a poet shines through in the beauty and delicacy of her prose."
Chicago Review of Books
"A beautiful, scorching memoir."
International Examiner
"Magnificent. . . . This is a memoir that needs to be read more than once."
The Seattle Times
"Weaving the handwritten Korean letters, the English translations and longer chapters recounting her own story intertwined with those of the women who came before her, Koh (who is now based in Seattle) renders a uniquely beautiful work of literature."
Oprah Daily
"Poignant…. Koh writes beautifully of the sacrifices made for love and of the intergenerational tensions between a mother and daughter. "
Crystal Hana Kim
"Exquisite. . . . This memoir will pierce you."
Jeannie Vanasco
"Indisputably brilliant."
Caitlin Horrocks
"A coming-of-age story, a family story, and a meditation on language and translation, with an emotional range to match."
Nicole Chung
"A beautifully crafted saga."
Net-A-Porter - The Moving Memoirs You Should Add to Your Reading List
"Powerful…. [Koh] fearlessly grapples with forgiveness, reconciliation, legacy and intergenerational trauma."
Literary Hub
"Exquisite."
Most Anticipated Book of the Year Buzzfeed
"A lyrical and profound personal excavation."
Don Mee Choi
"Koh remarkably and beautifully translates the language of mothers as the language of survivors."
Book Riot - 7 Memoirs on Learning a New Language
"Fascinating."
Starred Review Shelf Awareness
"A masterpiece, a love letter to mothers and daughters everywhere."
TIME
"A moving portrait of abandonment, forgiveness, and the strength of maternal love."
Sarah Blake
"I could read this book a thousand times over."
Library Journal
12/01/2019
Koh's (A Lesser Love) memoir centers on letters written by her mother during the seven years her parents lived in South Korea while Koh attended school in the United States. Part of a collection that Koh found shortly after she moved back to South Korea after her parents retired, the letters show the difficulties of being a mother to children in one country while living in and supporting a husband and relatives in another. The letters also function as a framing device for the stories of three generations of Koh's family. Chapters move from Koh's own struggles in California and Japan to those of her grandmothers, who suffered during times of war and uprisings. Throughout the work, Koh examines both the destructive and redemptive power of language. VERDICT A poignant transgenerational story of trauma and recovery in South Korea, Japan, and America.—John Rodzvilla, Emerson Coll., Boston
FEBRUARY 2020 - AudioFile
Author E.J. Koh’s solemn narration of this poignant story captures the language of mother-daughter relationships. Eun Ji is 15 when her parents go to South Korea for her father’s job, leaving her in California with her older brother for five years. As she recounts her memories of this period, sparked by the letters that her mother wrote during their separation, Koh’s fragile-sounding voice powerfully expresses Eun Ji’s pain and her mother’s guilt at leaving her young daughter. Koh’s deliberate pace reflects the personal tragedies in the lives of family members, including the grandmother, along with Eun Ji’s battle with depression. But the slowness of Koh’s delivery can make the listener feel a bit dragged down, too. Overall, though, Koh’s narration of this lyrical dance of language and emotion is haunting and deeply moving. M.F. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2019-09-29
How a series of letters helped the author understand why her parents left when she was a teenager.
When Koh (A Lesser Love: Poems, 2017) was 15, her mother and father left her and her older brother in California to move back to Korea, where Koh's father had been offered a lucrative job. "It was the kind of opportunity," she writes, "others might envy or criticize….Both position and pay left a knot of amazement on my parents' faces." The position was supposed to last three years, after which they would return to their children. But then the contract kept getting extended, leaving the author feeling abandoned. Her mother wrote letters and called home on a regular basis, but Koh struggled with her absence. Years later, she rediscovered the box of tear-stained letters written primarily in Korean and set about translating them. In the process, she began to see her mother in a more rounded, fleshed-out form and to fully comprehend the love transmitted through her mother's words and her ongoing pleas for forgiveness for leaving her daughter at such a pivotal age. Koh was also able to understand more about her grandmother, who witnessed the terrible 1948 massacre on Jeju Island, and what it means to be a mixture of Korean, Japanese, and American. The author includes her translations of some of her mother's letters as well as the originals. Her bewilderment regarding her mother's decision is deeply evident, as are her gradual perceptions about how the move affected her mother. Koh also provides information on her travels to Japan, where she studied, and her brief stint as a dancer in Korea, and she explains how she eventually found her way into a poetry writing program in college and how that further helped her grasp the feelings embedded in her mother's letters.
Intimate, subtle insights about a unique mother-daughter relationship.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940177845319 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Blackstone Audio, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 04/06/2020 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
| Sales rank: | 1,108,673 |
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