BookDragon Books for the Diverse Reader

With a name taken from each part of her life – Jane from her adoptive family, Jeong from her birthname, Trenka from her marriage – Trenka writes what just might be the most luminous of the adoptee genre. Raised in a conservative Christian home in a tiny Minnesota town, Trenka eventually returns to her native Korea to reclaim herself as Jeong Kyong-Ah, the second-to-last daughter of a Korean woman who survived years of brutal abuse at the hands of her alcoholic, deranged husband. The language is both startling in its intensity and lyrical in its breathtaking prose. You won’t be able to put it down – and even though Trenka changed all the names within, what fun it was to find some of my own friends momentarily captured within her indelible pages.

Review: “New and Notable Books,” AsianWeek, November 7, 2003

Readers: Adult

Published: 2003