Second-generation Korean Canadian Jane Park's gorgeous debut novel, Inheritance, achingly encapsulates an immigrant family coming to terms with their closest, yet least empathic, relationships: with each other. Anne Kim and her older brother, Charles, were born in Canada, and their parents tell Anne that they moved from Korea for her and Charles's sake. Eventually the family settles in rural Crow Plains, Alberta, where they own and operate a grocery store.
Thirty years later, in 2014, the father has died of a sudden stroke. Anne, now a New York City lawyer with a degree from Yale, returns to Edmonton to help her mother deal with the funeral and aftermath. Charles needs to be picked up from rehab, and she resents him for always forcing her to be the responsible one. Self-admitted "fuckup" Charles also bares hard truths: "You were lucky to be the one to leave and be able to send money and help from a clean distance. I stayed and got my hands dirty." Anne comes to realize how little she knows of their parents: she learns that their father was actually from North Korea; their mother lost an aunt who was rejected after surviving being a comfort woman for the Japanese military.
Park narrates between the "now" that is 2014 and the 1980s and 1990s of the siblings' growing up--and apart--with each time jump effortlessly revealing intricate details of outsider identities, racial tension, societal judgments, cultural divides, mental illness. She meticulously examines the complicated dynamics of a fractured family, of suffocating traditions and splintering rejections, while leading cautiously toward accepting honesty and the possibility of healing. --Terry Hong