Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #599369 in Books
• Published on: 2003-12-30
• Released on: 2003-12-30
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 8.00" h x .74" w x 5.32" l, .56 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Ginger Lee, the plucky Korean-American heroine of Hwang's debut novel, didn't realize that her life was broken until her mother showed up at the door of her New York City studio vowing to "fix" it. Mom arrives with a long list of family friends who have eligible Korean-American sons and insists on staying until the 27-year-old Ginger is safely married ("your bloom is almost over"). Ginger, a Ph.D. dropout who's now the oldest-and least ambitious-fashion assistant at A la Mode magazine, goes into a tailspin. She's never managed to tell her mother that she doesn't want to marry anyone, let alone an upstanding Korean-American professional, and she goes to extreme measures (such as throwing herself into her ersatz career) to keep her mother at bay-to no avail. Along with the 20-something angst typical of this genre-Ginger frets about her nonexistent romantic life and vapid colleagues-Hwang addresses more serious subjects like Ginger's encounters with subtle forms of racism and the psychic toll of her mother's expectations. She tosses off well-turned-if predictable-observations about the Old World Mrs. Lee (on her fashion sense: "as long as little Korean women populate the earth, the eighties would never die"). Hwang runs out of steam by the end of the story with an anticlimactic resolution, but the novel has plenty of engaging moments and arch humor. With a little polishing, Hwang could become a crowd-pleasing storyteller.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal
Adult/High School-Ginger Lee, 27, graduate school dropout and oldest flunky for a fashion magazine, awakens in her tiny New York apartment to find her fairy godmother at the door, promising to fix her life and get her a prince. This is a modern tale, so the apparition is really Ginger's Korean mother, arrived from Milwaukee to find a nice Korean doctor for her daughter to marry. Ginger, whose appreciation of Korean culture extends only to food, decides to sabotage the set-up dates while jump-starting her career to convince Mom that she doesn't need a husband. At A la Mode, Ginger's boss, her former college roommate, is in a take-no-prisoners battle with an arch rival for a coveted editor's position. Dependent on her mother to help pay her monthly bills, and indebted to the friend who rescued her from joblessness, Ginger wonders why the promise of her youth came to naught. This is a funny, touching account of an engaging young woman, and readers will cheer her on as she stumbles, learns, and grows.
Kathy Tewell, Chantilly Regional Library, VA
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Hwang's lively first novel takes a fresh look at the twentysomething dating scene from the perspective of a Korean American woman. Ginger Lee is a fashion assistant at A la Mode magazine, earning a small salary and not sure where she's headed professionally. Her life gets a lot more complicated when her mother appears at her door, determined to find Ginger a proper Korean husband. One problem: the man she offers up, Bobby Oh, the son of a family friend, happens to be engaged--to the horror of his family--to a woman who's not Korean. Ginger's mother wants her to break up the engagement. But Ginger has more important things on her mind; she might finally be getting the opportunity to be noticed (and hopefully promoted) at work, and she wants to attempt to heal the rift created between her brother and her mother when her brother married a non-Korean. Hwang throws in some unexpected surprises and manages to take a different approach to a popular genre. Kristine Huntley
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