Love Love

July 27, 2015
Woo’s poignant, engrossing follow up to 2009’s Everything Asian chronicles the lives of two adult siblings—responsible, organized Kevin Lee and his scattered younger sister, Judy—when a medical procedure surprisingly reveals that Kevin was adopted. After seeing how her father treated her dying mother, in addition to a lifetime of his withering disapproval, Judy is indifferent to the fact that her elderly dad now needs a new kidney. Kevin confronts him, then quits his job teaching tennis and goes to San Francisco on a quest to find out more about his birth parents. Both Kevin and Judy have endured recent divorces and miss their former spouses. Judy is attempting a relationship with erstwhile colleague Roger Nakamura, who seems to have a few secrets. After accepting an offer to stay in California with Claudia St. James, the eccentric mother of one of his precocious students, Kevin begins a physical relationship with her. Woo’s narrative takes serendipitous turns—he has a knack for making these twists seem organic, like things that would happen in life. Scenes recounting memories of family and lost love are also skillfully interspersed.

July 1, 2015
As their father's body is ravaged by illness, two siblings try to recover from failed marriages and rebuild their lives. Judy Lee is 38 years old. Still reeling from her divorce just over a year ago, she has no husband, no kids, and no house. She's just quit her temp job and lives in a small apartment littered with old food and worn clothes. Her brother, Kevin, a former tennis pro who's also recently divorced, is doing a little better, but he's just found out, after a routine screening to see if he can donate a kidney to his ailing father, that he was actually adopted. Even though Kevin is completely overwhelmed by the news, he thinks Judy should donate a kidney, but Judy is unable to forgive her father for having had "the audacity to carry on an affair while his wife was dying." Haltingly, Judy embarks on a new relationship with a former co-worker, but Kevin is mired in the past. Memories of his ex-wife haunt him even as he travels to San Francisco to search for information about his birth parents. Kevin and Judy are opposites: Kevin, the calm, methodical, successful one, Judy, the disorganized, chaotic mess. At times, this characterization feels a little too pat-and, when Judy's presence is occasionally subsumed in the moments when Kevin takes over the narrative, a tad imbalanced as well. But as the plot progresses, and each outgrows these self-imposed labels, the narrative becomes about the performance of self: who we tell ourselves we are, who others perceive us to be. "Who are you?" characters ask each other more than once. In the end, the answer is that we are so much more than can ever be articulated. A writer of deep pathos and empathy, Woo (Everything Asian, 2009) has given us a deeply felt novel of parents and children, husbands and wives-the many ways we try to connect and fail; and how sometimes, somehow, we succeed.

COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from October 15, 2015

At 40, Kevin Lee, an almost tennis pro-turned-club instructor, finds out he's adopted when he tries to donate a kidney to his less-than-deserving widower father. The only clues to Kevin's identity are an unfinished letter from his late mother with a nude centerfold of his birth mother. Meanwhile, his younger sister, Judy, abandons her latest temp job but takes a not-quite-budding office romance with her: Roger is late to their first date and dismisses a telling tattoo as a youthful mistake yet proves inexplicably devoted. Reeling from recent divorces, the siblings are, well, love-love for love. Both must leave--Kevin for San Francisco in search of his birth history, Judy for Cape Cod to recover from a rattlesnake attack--in order to figure out how to be whole. VERDICT Woo is currently two-for-two with rollicking novels about Korean American family dysfunction starring a pair of New Jersey siblings. If Woo's 2009 debut, Everything Asian, was charming and youthful, this new work is practically middle-aged, a biting, jaw-scraping, guffaw-inducing bit of fun complete with porn stars, rebel artists, and an aging, loyal dog who just might break your heart. Perfect for devotees of impossibly serendipitous comic fiction a la Carl Hiaasen and Tom Robbins and enhanced with multigenerational, cross-cultural depth.--Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from August 1, 2015
Woo's follow-up to his debut, Everything Asian (2009), follows two adult siblings forced to confront their dissatisfaction with their lives. Judy Lee is a 38-year-old temp who has more or less given up on her dreams of being an artist, while her older brother, Kevin, has been teaching tennis at a country club since his professional tennis career came to an end. Their father is dying of renal failure, but Kevin's plans to donate a kidney to him come to a screeching halt when he learns he is not only not a match for his father, he is not even his biological son. This discovery turns Kevin's world upside down, sending him on a quest for his birth parents and forcing him to confront his grief over the breakup of his marriage. Judy, who blames her father for the death of her mother, won't even consider donating a kidney. Woo's observations about aging, loss, and disillusionment are so smart, so sharp and astute that they'll haunt readers long after the final page has been turned. That he manages to find the beauty, humor, and even optimism in the struggle makes this glorious, at times painful, but always rewarding novel a stunning achievement.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)