It offers reflective meditations on motherhood and a ruminative quest to confront mysteries more abstract than figuring out where Park So-nyo went.ĭivided into four sections and an epilogue, the book allows several family members to weigh in on the shared crisis, often in an intimate second-person narration: “You all blamed each other for Mom’s going missing, and you all felt wounded.” Chi-hon, the elder daughter and now a noted novelist, comes first, followed by elder son Hyong-chol, then the father and, ultimately, the missing Park So-nyo herself. Rather than a briskly moving investigation into a woman’s disappearance, “Please Look After Mom” gazes moodily backward and inward.

But that praise and the quick synopsis above may suggest something different from what this novel actually is. Noteworthy advance praise has called it “suspenseful and moving” (Edwidge Danticat) and “a heartbreaking family mystery” (Abraham Verghese). “ Please Look After Mom” by best-selling South Korean novelist Kyung-sook Shin is the author’s first to be translated into English. The crisis creates “a fissure” in the family’s daily lives, and soon bickering and blame unfold in equal measure. The children follow up on sightings throughout the city, but leads fall flat. Fliers are posted and distributed by hand. Mom was pulled away from Father in the crowd, and the subway left as she tried to get her bearings.” A search ensues - an entire family mobilized to find the missing matriarch, Park So-nyo. Father got on, and when he looked behind him, Mom wasn’t there. Traveling from their home in the Korean countryside to visit their now-grown children in Seoul, an aging couple find themselves separated from each other in a busy subway station: “Mom and Father rushed toward the subway that had just arrived.

Please look after mother book