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Barb's Review of the book Please Look After Mom

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 Please Look After Mom, written by popular Korean novelist Kyung-sook Shin, was published in English after selling over a million copies in Korea. Shin is a visiting scholar at Columbia University, and lives in Seoul. 

Jeff taught this book in his Grade 10 World Literature Class to explore local culture. It does that and more. It represents the guilt of countless women in Korea of the new generation, struggling with the implications of society modernizing, as Korea careens into a super-modern nation. Korea changing from a war-torn country of farmers to the land of Samsung and Hyundai in one generation is bound to produce the themes explored in this book. 
But not just a book for and about Korean families, Please Look After Mom focuses on the universal theme of what it means to be a mother -- in this case defined through self-sacrifice. Mom's duty it seemed to the central character was to put her children, now grown and on their own, as well as her husband before herself. They let her. And through much of the book, they reflect on Mom through eyes clouded by guilt. You see, they are so busy with their own lives in the big city, with important jobs and a new mistress that they fail to recognize Mom's illiteracy, the symptoms of a debilitating cancer and subsequent dementia that led to Mom being left behind at a crowded subway stop. In pain, unable to read or think straight, she wanders until she disappears, never to be found. 
Emotionally heart-wrenching, the book explores in turn each family member's reflections of Mom, then guilt, sorrow and finally penitence. The characters are well drawn and developed. Mom's careerist daughter and philandering husband are both referred to by the author as "you" as they deserved the author's apparent scolding. The under-achieving much loved first-born son, the over-achieving middle daughter who left the country home for international life, the over-taxed daughter who kept having children, and the thoughtless husband who always walked ahead of her -- all deeply missed Mom in the end. 
The request to look after Mom came too late and instead ends as a prayer to God to Please Look After Mom. Get your hankies ready. 

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