Yun~ Shelter
- Zebra Reads
- Jun 29, 2023
- 3 min read
There is not a lot out there on Jung Yun, but she is a contemporary author, and was born in Seoul, S. Korea. It seems she moved to the US when she was fairly young and she grew up in North Dakota. In her adult years she has focused herself in the US northeast. She attended college at Vassar, The University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Currently she is an English professor at the George Washington University, which is a private university in Washington, DC.
Shelter was Yun’s first book, published in 2016 and she recently followed that up with a second book, called O Beautiful, which was published in 2021.
Overview: A Korean man (Kyung) and his decidedly not Korean wife (Gillian) are facing financial ruin. Tragedy strikes leaving a path of destruction for Kyung and Gillian to try to navigate. Kyung tries so hard to break the cycle of abuse and lies that permeated his childhood that he only ends up exacerbating both problems. Making one wrong turn after another, Kyung finally ends up breaking the cycle in the least predictable way possible, but only after he loses everything else along the way.
My Take: This is yet another book that I never would have read if left to my own devices. My tastes are in period pieces, preferably mysteries. A modern-day drama is not generally top of my list. However, this one I finished in a few hours. Albeit, I was sitting in a hospital having a blood patch done, so I was kind of a captive audience, but I found it to be a very compelling read nonetheless. It took very little time to get the story started and once it started there was no downtime. Stories and lies unraveled til the end. And every time Kyung had an opportunity to redeem himself he would find a way to screw it all up. Generally, these adventures in folly annoy, frustrate, or embarrass me (high empath here). In this case, though, the pace was fast enough and the story compelling enough to keep me consistently engaged.
Who would love it: Those of us in the US looking to better understand hard driving Asian cultures and see how they are passed down might enjoy the cultural implications of the book. The interplay between the American and Korean culture clashes provides interesting contrasts. I also was intrigued by the various representations of marriage/relationships described by the author. None are positive though they vacillate between benignly bad and outright hostile. Of all things this is a story about prophesy, self-imposed or otherwise, and how we all fight them or follow them; how much a prophesy haunts our every move, to try to avoid the inevitable consequences, and how sometimes letting them go is the only way not to fulfill them.
Who might avoid it: Content warnings include graphic rape, suicide, and child and spousal abuse (emotional and physical). I might imagine that if you are Korean and have a difficult time extracting your own culture from itself, this might be a frustrating book. The picture painted of Korean culture is not particularly positive (though no better is the culture painted of Americans). Infidelity also plays a role, and while it has a major impact on the story, the act itself is almost benign (perhaps my own views of this based on personal experience shapes my thoughts here). There isn’t a particularly “happy” ending, though I found it satisfying. It seemed like it ended where it needed to, though. Most of the damage had been done and more would have been superfluous. Less would have made it all to happy, and slightly less real.
Bottom Line: Maybe cycles don’t break because we spend too much of our time trying to make sure we break them.
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