Korean Girl in America
By: Hope Kim / Narrated By: Melissa Sternenberg
Length: 7 hrs and 6 mins
Holy crud, what a hot mess! Wait, is that too unkind?
Perhaps I’m being overly harsh, and maybe young ones will like Korean Girl in America. But I don’t think so. It’s not that EVERY book has to be enjoyable for adults also, that certain books are ONLY for a certain age-group. It’s just that THIS audiobook is structured in such a way that the younger audience might be in for a Snooze Fest (But don’t worry, Hope goes on such freaked out tirades, and Melissa Sternenberg’s voice is so thin that things get shrilllllll, and you’ll wake up, like, IMMEDIATELY!).
Obviously, tho’ it’s categorized as Fiction, this is somewhat autobiographical. Our author is Hope; our protagonist is Hope. And each and EVERY incident sounds like Kim puking her guts out in an effort to make sense of her past.
Fourteen-year old Hope is at a new school, yet again, and her grades are just okay, but she’s not living up to her potential. Naturally, this lands her in the school counselor’s office, Mr. Morris—a cool twenty-something baby-faced guy who also has a manly jawline. He has a 2-hour chunk of time once a week that he can devote solely to Hope and to all her emotional and psychological needs. But will he understand her culture, her race? She is, after all, Korean even if she’s mistaken ALL the time for Japanese/Chinese, and blah blah blah.
And here’s where I think the younger audience will get bored to tears: The whole book is their counseling sessions, which wouldn’t be bad except for the fact that there really isn’t any dialogue between them. Each of them speaks in these loooooooong monologues, info dumping of the very worst kind. Add to that a speaking character dubbed The Narrator who has a fake British accent (dePLORably done by Sternenberg) who is used solely for even MORE info dumping, and we’re talking hot mess. The Narrator adds historical and political context to Hope’s lengthy delivery of stories of her life, and I was about ready to claw my eyes out. Seriously! Cuz I thought I was alREADY doing my part in listening to Hope’s shrill chatter and to Mr. Morris’s stoic sharing about his own life (he REALLY shares, like, so much I thought he was being unprofessional and was letting a fourteen-year old bamboozle him).
So what do we have? If you want some history of Korea, if you wanna hear about a young girl’s My Life Has Been So Hard story, if you want to listen to a groovy man’s ENDless talks about how “emotion was spoken of in my family,” give Korean Girl in America a try.
If, however, you value your 7 hours and 6 minutes? Run, run to the hills!
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