The Queen of Tears

January 23, 2006
Front-loaded with deft character portraits, this multigenerational family saga, picked up from Hawaii's Mutual Publishing, fails to fulfill its considerable potential. An expatriate Korean former movie star, Soong Nan Lee has traveled to Honolulu in an attempt to solve her American children's highly American problems: elder daughter Wong Ju is keeping her loveless marriage together for the sake of her spoiled, alienated teenage son; middle child Donny is marrying a stripper named Crystal; and younger daughter Darian is dropping out of Berkeley and shacking up with Crystal's drug-dealer brother. The family's fights and reconciliations are told from alternating points of view and are intercut throughout with Soong Nan's flashbacks to her violent, glamorous past in 1950s Seoul. In describing Soong Nan's geisha-like training for stardom, McKinney (Bolohead Row
) demonstrates a talent for restraint and tight pacing. It peters out, however, as the angles multiply: when Wong Ju's traumatic coming-of-age in Las Vegas is revisited at length, her character is lent a newfound depth, but McKinney abandons her for one of many floundering side plots. And just as the family as a whole is finally finding fulfillment and success by building a business together, an improbable disaster intervenes. The result is a shocking, unsatisfying shift into melodrama.

February 15, 2006
McKinney invents a reigning queen of Korean historical romance films, Soong Nan, who is no stranger to real-life drama. But it wasn't until she went to live with her estranged adult children in Hawaii that she began to understand what drama really is. Ne'er-do-well son Donny has yet another business venture he's hoping Soong Nan will bankroll. Daughter Won Ju is in an unhappy marriage, held together for the sake of her troubled teenage son. And younger daughter Darian has dropped out of college on the mainland, searching for a way to honor her ethnic heritage. As Soong Nan becomes more deeply enmeshed in her childrens' lives, she finds herself reflecting on the turbulence of her early years as a teenage survivor of Korea's civil war, her movie career, and her marriages to two powerful men. McKinney's portrait of a besieged woman within a multicultural, multigenerational family saga poignantly and powerfully dramatizes the troubles women face, the pan-Asian melting pot of Hawaiian culture, and the conflicts inherent in Americanization.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)