Stone Angels

In Rho’s immersive debut novel (after the memoir American Seoul), a Pittsburgh woman explores her Korean roots. In 2006, recent divorcee Angelina Lee travels to South Korea, which she left at age six, to attend a summer university program in Seoul. Hoping to reunite with family she doesn’t remember and grieving her mother’s recent death by suicide, Angelina goes to Gwangju to meet a cousin and their grandmother. She discovers that her mother had an older sister, Sunyuh-unni, who was abducted by the Japanese in the 1940s and forced to work in a brothel. Though her grandmother has dementia, and her cousin is convinced that Sunyuh is dead, Angelina sets out to find her with the help of a fellow student and journalist named Keisuke Ono. The two search records, talk to a survivor of the brothels, and begin an affair, which Angelina ends, believing the younger man isn’t ready to become a step-parent to her two children. Rho expertly explores her characters’ complex emotions, especially Angelina’s, as she struggles to find contentment following a contentious divorce and wrestles with guilt over her inability to prevent her mother’s death. Readers will savor this weighty family drama. Agent: Amy Bishop-Wycisk, Trellis Literary Management. (Mar.)