A tender exploration of belonging which focuses on Koreans living in America.
When Margot Lee drives a friend to LA, she wants to pop in and see her single mother, Mina, who hasn’t been answering her calls. When Margot arrives at the apartment, she finds her mother has tragically died and whilst it looks like an accident, there are a few things which Margot thinks worth exploring, like the newspaper cutting of a strangers obituary which her mother has hidden in a drawer. This leads Margot to uncover all the secrets and tragedies of her mother’s life, which until that point she had been so ashamed of.
Whilst I must admit that this story didn’t grip me in the way I had hoped, I did love how intricately woven the stories of Margot today, and Mina when she first moved to America were, and how Margot moves from shame and disgust about her mother at the beginning to understanding and compassion by the end. There were some very relatable subjects, like the way Margot has become stuck in an office job out of necessity rather than pursue her passions, and the shame Margot felt about her mother as a young girl, and I loved the parallels drawn between the two - Margot visiting the same Ferris wheel her mother had decades before, for example.
There was a real power to the way Mina describes trying to fit in as an immigrant in America, and her refusal to learn English when Americans refuse to embrace her as part of their country - it feels so important to have stories like this right now, and Kim has done a brilliant job of telling the story in a gentle yet impactful way.

You think you know your parents, you grow up knowing everything they do, their loves, likes and dislikes, how they live their lives....but what if that was only the tip of the iceberg, what if they’d lived a whole other life that you had no idea about?

Margot Lee has been trying to get in touch with her mother, as she has failed to answer her calls, she decides a surprise visit is in order and whilst on a trip to LA from her home in Seattle she stops to visit her mother Mina. She is devastated to find her mother’s body, fearing that there was foul play involved she starts looking in to her mother’s life and discovers a whole side to Mina that she didn’t know existed and finds out just how she touched the lives of the people around her.

Now I’ve probably made that sound like a murder mystery, its not, the story flits between two time lines we have Mina, Margot’s mother arriving in LA from South Korea in the 80’s and the story of how she came to be in the States and how she starts her new life, we follow her as she makes friends, finds work in a Korean supermarket and how she finds love. We also have the story of Margot and the aftermath of finding Mina’s body and her quest to find out more about Mina’s life.

The story is very well done, sometimes going backwards and forwards in time can spoil a story for me, especially if you don’t particularly care for one timeline but here it worked perfectly. It was a little slow to start with but once it got going I found the story sucked me in, so many lives ended up being intertwined, I needed to know how it would be resolved. The Last Story of Mina Lee really was a superb read.

Thanks to Net Galley for providing me with a copy in exchange for an honest review.

I really got swept up in this novel and loved the descriptive passages on Koreatown, food and poverty. Especially loved the correlation between the Korean immigrant experience and the Mexican immigrant experience in LA. I found the wrap up at the end a bit forced and rushed, but overall thought it was well written and relatable. This is my fourth book this year by a Korean or Korean-American writer and I am keen to seek out more.

This book was so good. There was so much to unpick, part of it was so different to my lived experience yet at the same time it was universal. Loved it.

I greatly enjoyed this book, thank you for giving me a preview copy. The plot was interesting and fast paced and I sympathised with the characters. This is the first novel I have read by this author but I hope it will not be the last!

As an Asian woman I am always delighted to read about asian characters, especially when mother-daughter relationships are involved. The discord and difference in experience between the two explored in this book felt important, relatable and made me cry. Asians are not all the same - the first time immigrant and 2nd gen child can experience life very very differently. Dual timelines aren't always advisable but here it was used effectively. I really really enjoyed this read.

I love books that focus on the relationship between mother and daughter. And i love books that go back and forth in time, particularly from the viewpoint of different characters. I really enjoyed this book and the characters Margot and Mina Lee, and i would have liked there to be a bit of a quicker plot.

Mina Lee is a great character - she leaps off the page in a rich tradition of great characters like Owen Meany.

This was a really deep, personal, and oftentimes dark book about love, loss, and family, centring the life of Mina, a Korean immigrant living in LA, and her daughter, Margot. This novel beautifully yet heartbreakingly shows the disconnect between a mother and daughter, both having their own struggles, and Margot's journey of understanding and becoming closer to her mother after her death, while at the same time learning about herself and her own identity. The book alternates between Margot's narrative in the present day and Mina's from when she first arrived in LA. I thought this worked really well in allowing us to explore both of their lives and we get to learn about Mina alongside Margot. I thought the chapters of Mina's narrative were stronger as sometimes stuff happened in the present day that felt a bit unnecessary and dragged out. For example, towards the end there was a bit of an info dump as certain things are revealed to Margot by another character, which felt kind of unnecessary as we as readers already knew this information from the Mina chapters and it came across as a rather heavy-handed way of tying up all of the ends in a rushed way.

There’s an element of mystery to this story as Margot attempts to figure out how her mother died. Personally, I thought this was the weakest part of the story. It seemed a bit random and unrealistic of Margot to investigate her mother’s death when there wasn’t much at the start to suggest that there was any foul play, so it came across as a little weird and forced when she kept questioning and digging deeper into it. I also found the actual revelation at the end about how Mina died kind of anticlimactic as while it was in a way a surprising “twist,” what followed (such as the characters’ reactions and the aftermath) seemed a bit underwhelming and rushed.

Despite this, to me, the strength of this novel lies in the deep dive into the relationship between a mother and daughter and the exploration into various themes such as race, poverty, mental health, death, family, and so on. There was so much in this book that I think others born into immigrant families will be able to relate to and it’s definitely a novel that I will be thinking about for some time. After reading this (and finding out that this is their debut novel), I will definitely be looking out for any future works by the author.

I received this book free from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

"A single human being could live an entire continent of pain and worry and longing."

This is one of those rare books that opens a window onto an entirely different world, but is so universally relatable that you barely even notice.
The themes are broad and familiar; the relationships between mother and daughter, between men and women, between friends. The settings have an immediacy and a vibrancy that creates understanding even when (like me) one has never been to LA.
It is told in two halves - between the titular Mina Lee, who arrives in America heartbroken and anonymous in the summer of 1987, and her daughter Margot, who finds her mother dead in the fall of 2014. Mina tries to carve out a life for herself, while Margot tries to uncover what was left of it.
Like most books told in this way, there was one half (Mina's) that I enjoyed infinitely more. Mina is the heroine of the novel, as tragic and determined as any found across literature. The allusions to Teas of the D'Urbervilles were not lost and are not coincidence.
At times the pacing was strange to me, and especially near the end it starts to jump and skip through the years, which is such a contrast to the elegantly ponderous pace of the first half of the book that it really took me by surprise. But it kept the story moving, and at times I definitely found this a hard book to put down.

Asian women take up so little space in so much of western culture, it's thrilling to read of an Asian mother and daughter whose secrets are so weighty.

The Last Story of Mina Lee by Nancy Jooyoun Kim succeeds as a novel about the immigrant experience and a conflicted mother daughter relationship. However sometimes the dialogue is a bit clunky and the plot, especially towards the end, a little contrived.

I love this story. It is an example of dual timelines done right. A mother first emigrating to the states and her daughter who is American born. This is a great book flight with Pachinko. (Thank you to netgalley for allowing me to review)