Literary agent Catherine Cho (Inferno) considers family, legacy, and fate in The Devoted, a deft debut novel of subtle questioning with a fast-accelerating plot.
Eunha is raised by her Korean grandmother in a village in Hong Kong, alongside her older brother, Solomon, and a single occasional visitor, a boy named Kai. It is a life of isolation, purportedly for safety's sake; the children's father is a Dragon Head, a powerful leader in organized crime. Eunha is aware from a young age of the powerful forces at play around her, causing her father's absence and her mother's institutionalization, bending her brother's fate, and leading her beloved grandmother to yearn for another life for Eunha. In adulthood, Eunha believes she's found that different path, but marriage to "a man who had never loved me" and a life of proper lunches at the Palm Club with other wives leaves Eunha no less lonely. Then her three-year-old son is abducted, and that shell of a life, too, is upended.
The child is returned to his mother, apparently none the worse, but Eunha learns yet again that her life is not her own. She begins to push in earnest against the powerful men who have always surrounded her: her father and her brother. In the upheaval, she reunites with Kai, now a Dragon Head as well, both the sensitive, magnetic boy she knew in youth and a frighteningly compelling leader. She considers again her brother and their childhood friend: "The way they turned and bent, synchronized. They looked like separate halves, reflected men." Eunha questions whether she might still find the unencumbered life her grandmother had wanted for her. Can she keep her son safe? Can she choose for herself?
Much of The Devoted unfolds at a contemplative pace, evoking the powerlessness Eunha feels in her own existence. But as she starts to exert her own will, secrets and betrayals reveal themselves one on top of another, and the novel gathers speed into an electric tale of intrigue, many layered and consistently surprising. Cho's first novel is at once a family saga, a narrative of identity and belonging, a love story, and a tale of suspense. The deceptively quiet package probes class and respectability and whether one can ever escape their upbringing. Eunha's struggles are softly spoken but pack a wallop. --Julia Kastner, blogger at pagesofjulia
Shelf Talker: The fast-accelerating plot of Catherine Cho's first novel follows a young girl shielded from her father's criminal underworld as she grows into a woman who must fight to chart her own way.