Please Look After Mom: A Review

Please Look After Mom is a beautiful, sad and lyrical tale for anyone who has ever had a Mom or been a Mom. This one came to me as part of the national book club influencer program for http://www.EverythingMom.com and I found myself reading it with difficulty. This is not an easy story. The plot begins when the mother of a successful family in Korea goes missing at a train station in Seoul. It is an amazing rapid start to the plot that cannot help but hook you instantly. The mother, it is revealed, has been suffering stunning headaches and previously battled breast cancer. Through each one of the grown children, the mother’s story is revealed slowly as that of a young girl who grew up in poverty in the Korean countryside and could not be educated or kept safe beyond a certain age. So instead she was presented to a man, a stranger, for an arranged marriage. Together they build a home and have four children. The young mother excels at feeding and nourishing things. Her gardening ability is unparalleled. Everything she touches blooms and her young family grows strong and successful. But they move on and for the most part still see their mother as she is defined within the context of home. The mother is a martyr and she goes to great extremes to nourish family and farm. This is a book with a unique narrative style utlizing the second person throughout. That is a quite uncommon technique as most novelists employ first person or third person. Often second person is tricky and not well done. But here the effect is one of drawing the reader fully into the story almost as their own character, a family member themselves participating in the retelling of the mother’s life and the search. It is a remarkable accomplishment. Some chapters are told from the viewpoints of the different children and the husband as well. As we meet each one of the adult children we discover them realizing how little they know of their mother’s inner life. It is a sad statement of fact that the daughter, a writer, when preparing a poster seeking help to find the mising mother, doesn’t know her mother’s true birthdate. A further sad statement on the marriage is revealed in the chapter when the hard as nails father of the family returns to their marital home and lays in bed overcome with grief that astonishes even him. He reflects on his habit of always walking too far ahead of the mother as a habit that may have led to her disappearance. And he understands too late how uncaring this one daily ritual must have seemed to his spouse. He understands too late also that he should have fought harder for better health care for his talented and undemanding wife. He feels guilt and shame and suprising amounts of love. Similarly each of the children realize the many sacrifices their mother made daily and they wonder if she was ever happy. They are all healthy and very successful in their fields. “After Mom went missing, I realized there’s an answer to everything. I could have done everything she wanted me to. It wasn’t important. I don’t know why I got under her skin over things like that.” Please Look Ater Mom is sad and beautiful and not for the faint of heart. It is a great story of sacrifice and, despite its fictional basis, speaks volumes about family relationships. It speaks to of the heart’s many facets and the grief that comes with losing your strongest anchor in the world. “Even though Mom’s missing, summer will come and fall will come again and winter will come, like this. And I’ll be living in a world without Mom.” The daughter has always had such a complicated relationship with her mother, but she alos realizes her mother’s impact too late. She wrestles as an unmarried female with whether her mother succeeded in life, or was ever happy or content. She grapples too with how good a daughter she was or was not. Her desparate search is weighted with all of the events in her past and her unexpressed sentiments. It is pure tragedy. It is a rare book that causes a reader to reflect on their own life with an eye to change. This one has that ability.

Please Look After Mom, by Kyung-Sook Shin, is by Random House Canada. $29.95 hardcover and 237 pages (translated from the Korean)

This is a $$$$ 1/2 out of $$$$$.

I received a copy of this book for free in order to review it.