A Cab Called Reliable: A Novel - Softcover

Kim, Patti

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312190301 ISBN 13: 9780312190309

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin, 1998

Synopsis

An extraordinary debut and exciting new voice in multicultural fiction.

About this title

About the Author:

Patti Kim was born in Pusan, Korea, in 1970 and immigrated to the United States in 1974. She was the Diane Cleaver Fellow at Ledwig House, the New York writers' colony. A Cab Called Reliable is her first novel. It won the 1997 Towson University Prize for Literature and was a nominee for the Book-of-the-Month Club's Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction. She lives in Potomac, Maryland.

From Kirkus Reviews:

An affecting if uneven debut in which a Korean girl, newly immigrated to the US, struggles to transcend the chaos of a strange land and of a violent, overstressed family. Ever since Ahn Joo arrived in Arlington, Virginia, with her parents and younger brother, her parents have fought unceasingly about her father's drinking and her mother's lack of respect. It's true, Ahn Joo realizes, that her father contradicts the stereotype of the hardworking Korean immigrant who opens a grocery and proceeds to grow rich in America. Fleeing an abusive father of his own in Korea rather than moving to the US in pursuit of wealth, he lacks ambition and seems happy with his welding job. Still, even eight-year-old Ahn Joo is unprepared for her mother's extreme reaction to her husband's laziness: One day, as Ahn Joo is walking home from school, she sees her mother, with her son in tow, fleeing home in a cab with the puzzling name ``Reliable'' painted on the door. Entering their apartment, Ahn Joo finds a note from her mother promising to come back for her someday, but as the years go by and her mother never calls or writes, the girl is left alone to face adolescence, care for her father, and puzzle out her family's mysteries. The author deftly evokes such vivid moments as Ahn Joo's embarrassment when her father takes over a snack cart in Washington, and her depiction of her heroine's struggle to come to terms with a new land--as well as of the push-pull relationship between father and daughter--are both memorable and moving. In the end, though, the lack of any real catharsis or resolution renders the parts greater than the whole. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0312190301
• ISBN 13: 9780312190309
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 156