Like Wind Against Rock by Nancy Kim: book review

Like Wind Against Rock (2021) is set in California, America, in contemporary times.

The narrator is thirty-nine year old Alice Chang, divorced, evicted, and living with her sixty-two-year old Korean mother. Alice’s father has just died. Her mother has a more active socal life with more dates than Alice, a new haircut, and a new job. Her mother is thriving; Alice is barely surviving.

Alice is finding it difficult being single again after twenty years of marriage. To distract herself from sadness, she cleans her mother’s garage and finds her father’s diary. Il Joo (John) was a dentist. Not wanting to tell her mother yet, Alice gives the diary to a work colleague, Mr Park, to translate.

Mr Park is now the second narrator. He is shocked by the entries in the diary. Is it possible that he knows Alice’s father? The diary begins in January 2010 – he writes about his wife, after forty years of marriage, and then about his daughter Alice.

Mr Park has a dilemma – should he translate it, and should he tell Alice what the diary contains before he translates it? He thinks about his own marriage and divorce. He thinks about family secrets and what should be told and what should remain a secret.

This is an interesting book about family traditions, expectations, desires, and secrets.

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MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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