In Full Bloom

Rating:
Summary: Funny and smart
Review: Giving up on earning a PhD, Ginger Lee comes to NYC to be the assistant to her college room mate at a fashion magazine. Ginger's successful real estate agent mother unexpectedly shows up one day, eager to marry Ginger off to an appropriate Korean spouse. Simultaneously, the potential for a promotion at work raises Ginger's career competitiveness. Ginger decides to sabotage her mother's efforts at matchmaking while dedicating herself to acheiving success in fashion.

Unlike many of the thousands of "girl moves to NYC to make it big in fashion / publishing" books, In Full Bloom actually has quite a few things to say. Ginger's struggles with her Korean heritage / American upbringing are very well written. The estrangement between Ginger's brother and mother over her brother's marriage to a white woman is not sugar coated, and helps the reader emphasize with Ginger's ambivalent romantic life.

The juxtaposition of Ginger's Korean family life and her career fashion nicely parallels the insincerities that exist in both worlds, and the assistance that can come from unexpected people. The reader roots for Ginger to succeed in her career and to find the right person to share her life with, while nurturing her beautiful relationship with her mother. The only off note in the book is Ginger's relationship with her college room mate, Sam, who seems to primarily use Ginger to only favor her own interests.

This book is a great mix of humor, family love, and watching Ginger begin to grow into adulthood and I recommend it highly.

Rating:
Summary: So-so
Review: I celebrate the fact that a female Korean-American author created a voice for an under-represented and stereotyped group in the US - Korean-American women. However, I was dismayed to find that her book's title character reinforced many stereotypes: designer label junkie, superficiality, flighty, and most of all...weak.

It seemed as if the author was more concerned with dropping designer named clothes rather than flushing out her character's motivations, interests, and strengths. I found that the main character was overly superficial and her personality did not lead me to feel compassion for her, so I ended up quickly losing interest in her.

What irritated me the most about the way Caroline Hwang created the story was the way she made the Korean-American woman to be so weak and subservient to EVERYONE: her mother, her coworkers, her friends, her boss...she let everyone take advantage of her while making excuses for this behavior. Why make the main character so passive? How long can you keep reading until you realize that, halfway through the book, this main character has done NOTHING to absolve her weaknesses.

While I understand that the clashing relationship with her mother takes a huge chunk of the storyline, I would have liked to see more interaction with other young Korean-Americans. Must we reinforce the stereotype of the asexual Asian that American movies and television already show?

To sum it all up, I was very excited to see a new Korean-American author attempt to portray the current cultural situation of Korean-Americans. However, I was ultimately disappointed to find that this book chose to highlight the negative stereotypes rather than offering a creative and varying view of Korean-Americans today. While I did not expect Hwang to represent and capture every detail of Korean-American culture, I would have liked to relate to SOMETHING in her characters and book. Maybe her next novel will fare better.

Rating:
Summary: a mixed review
Review: There were parts of this book that I liked and times when I rooted for the heroine, Ginger, but other times when the story seemed a bit cliche and dragged...The book deals with a mother-daughter relationship from a Korean protagonist's viewpoint. The protagonist's mother is on a mission to find her daughter a suitable Korean husband. The theme seemed a little trite but if that is the subject matter, so be it. I liked the depiction of the fashion magazine that Ginger works at, Ginger's insights and musings about her cultural identity and the struggles to define one's self, and the way the characters are fully drawn out--I could visualize them in real life. I also liked how Ginger had heroic moments of standing up for herself and standing her ground. It was a pretty good read...