Author: An Na
Publisher: Books on Tape
Rating: worthy
This audio novel is read by Kim Mai Guest.
How could I not read (or rather listen) to a novel written by someone with a perfect anagram name?! An Na's name, I have to admit, attracted my attention; then I read the blurb and thought I'd give it a try. It turned out to be a great example of a novel that really ought to have been written in the third person PoV, but unfortunately, the author made the mistake of writing it in 1PoV and it suffered from that.
This novel is about Mina, a Korean-American girl who is heading into her last year of high school and also on the verge of a meltdown. Her racist mother presses her mercilessly to do well in high school, and Mina has reacted by digging a well of lies for herself about how well she's doing at school when she isn't well at all. She works for free at her mother's dry-cleaning business, but is liberally "paying herself" for her work by helping herself to money from the register and doctoring the receipts to hide her theft. Mina spreads a web of lies around herself and gets into a bad relationship with a rather possessive and abusive guy she knows from church.
As if this isn't bad enough, she meets a rather irresponsible Mexican-American boy named Ysrael, and starts hanging with him, foolishly deciding that this is the life for her and the hell with school. She gets to know Ysrael when he's hired to help at the dry cleaner's because Mina's father can't work due to an injured back. She starts blowing off her study sessions to meet with him secretly, and of course this whole house of cards eventually comes tumbling down. This precipitates a crisis in her family, inevitably, and all the lies come tumbling out.
I found this story lacking in entertainment value for me, but I can see how it might be of interest or utility to younger people, especially people who are of a non-western ethnicity, but as short as it is, it's worth the time of younger people of all colors and creeds to take to read it, just to stretch their minds a little, so I'm going to rate it as a worthy - just. If it had not been as short as it was (only four disks), I honestly don't think I would have finished it.
