Secondhand World

Isolation pervades Min's haunting debut, a depiction of a tragedy-beset Korean-American family living in upstate New York during the aftermath of the Korean War. As the book opens, Isadora (Isa) Myung Hee Sohn, 18, has just spent 95 days on a pediatric burn unit in Albany, N.Y., following a fire that destroyed her house and killed her parents. The backstory—a swirling, textured and beautifully detailed web of perception that records a divided life—comprises the rest of the novel. Isa's mother is a beauty from a wealthy family in Seoul; her father is a former South Korean soldier, now a rigid science professor. Brother Stephen died in an accident as a toddler; her parents' extreme grief and subsequent neglect leave Isa herself feeling "insubstantial, a transparency that hung like a scrim between them and the child they had lost." The teenage Isa—angst-ridden, disaffected and subject to racial prejudice at school—escapes into the arms of an albino outsider named "Hero" in a sequence that doesn't fit. But when Isa finds out that her mother is having an affair, her ensuing actions destroy her parents' carefully constructed semblance of happily married life. The plot lurches and meanders, but Min's rendering of an outsider family's tight-knit alienation is spot-on. (Oct.)