THE LUCKY GOURD SHOP

Scott, Joanna Catherine

ISBN 10: 1878448013 / ISBN 13: 9781878448019

Published by MacMurray & Beck, Inc., Denver, CO, U.S.A., 2000

About this Item

Signed by author on title page. By the author of TOURMALINE. Fine, in fine, mylar-protected dust jacket. Q. Seller Inventory # 4466

Bibliographic Details

Title: THE LUCKY GOURD SHOP

Publisher: MacMurray & Beck, Inc., Denver, CO, U.S.A.

Publication Date: 2000

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: Fine

Dust Jacket Condition: Fine

Signed: Signed by Author(s)

Edition: First Edition, First Printing

About this title

Synopsis:

In this brave and affecting novel, the mother of three adopted Korean children tries to help them discover their birth parents. But what factual information she's provided doesn't coincide with what the oldest child remembers - and knows is true. It is painfully clear that the children's history is lost.

From this powerful beginning, Joanna Catherine Scott takes us back to Korea and the history these will never know. And she tells the heartbreaking story of the young woman who was their mother, whom circumstance betrays.

The Lucky Gourd Shop is a tapestry of voices and histories, a gentle reminder that we are more than where we began; that the world is everywhere uneven in it sympathies; that the compassion we engender and the love we inspire are in part ours to create. It is a work of honesty, empathy and great power - a captivating tale of the human spirit.

Review:

Joanna Scott's richly imagined The Lucky Gourd Shop begins in America, where the adoptive mother of three Korean children tries to find out more about their pasts. But where she fails, we succeed; the rest of the novel takes us back a generation, to a South Korea ravaged by years of poverty and war. There we meet Mi Sook--orphan, independent spirit, and, as soon becomes clear, the children's birth mother. Found abandoned in an alley and raised like a stray in the back room of a coffee shop, Mi Sook grows up pretty, bubbly, and happy enough, but still "that rare creature in her society, one who did not draw her sense of self from fixed relationships with others." In South Korea, of course, to be without fixed relationships--to be without family--is to live in a dangerous limbo, and soon enough Mi Sook finds trouble. Throughout the events that follow, Scott's powerful narrative voice never fails to convince. In her telling, this is a story without villains; even the violent husband is no monster when we learn the intense economic and cultural pressures with which he struggles. More to the point, it's also a story without victims; as in all great works of literature, Scott's characters are made of flesh and blood, capable of agency and action and especially mistakes. This first novel succeeds on a number of levels, as an imaginative leap between nations and generations and as a snapshot of a culture in transition. Most of all, however, The Lucky Gourd Shop is a precise, affecting, and unsentimental portrait of Mi Sook herself, of hardships endured without knowing they're hardships and choices that are scarcely choices at all. --Chloe Byrne