From St. Martin's Press book club comes a coming of age novel that is written by a Korean-American. The story is about a Korean immigrant coming of age in America.
There's a memoir in there somewhere.
The first paragraph describes a memory of a place, a recollection of a childhood that you suspect actually happened to the author. It's not uncommon to find novels about immigrant children coming of age, written by immigrants who have come of age.
As a non-immigrant, readers find these stories intriguing because it gives insight into their world, one that is so much a part of them that they can't see how others see it. What better way than to read things like The Kite Runner to discover the States through the eyes of an Afghani?
Everything Asian, by Sung J. Woo, was laid down a couple of weeks ago. Will it sell? Who could say?
The opening that arrived this morning in the inbox was full of nostalgia, as the young man surveys, in present tense, the facade of his childhood home and the empty lot that was the strip mall where the family had their little shop.
That's the key for this novel as memoir, if the flap copy is any guide. The author presents a "strip mall world" for the reader. It's the fresh and new aspect of his coming of age tale. Literary agents are always after fresh and new in the tried and true.
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