Forgotten Country, Catherine Chung
Forgotten Country, Catherine Chung
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Forgotten Country

Author: Catherine Chung

Narrator: Emily Woo Zeller

Unabridged: 8 hr 59 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 03/01/2012


Synopsis

On the night Janie waits for her sister Hannah to be born, her grandmother tells her a story: Since the Japanese occupation of Korea, their family has lost a daughter in every generation, so Janie is charged with keeping Hannah safe. As time passes, Janie hears more stories, while facts remain unspoken. Her father tells tales about numbers, and in his stories everything works out. In her mother's, deer explode in fields, frogs bury their loved ones in the ocean, and girls jump from cliffs and fall like flowers into the sea. Within all these stories are warnings.Years later, when Hannah inexplicably cuts all ties and disappears, Janie embarks on a mission to find her sister and finally uncover the truth beneath her family's silence. To do so, she must confront their history, the reason for her parents' sudden move to America twenty years earlier, and ultimately her conflicted feelings toward her sister and her own role in the betrayal behind their estrangement.Weaving Korean folklore within a modern narrative of immigration and identity, Forgotten Country is a fierce exploration of the inevitability of loss, the conflict between obligation and freedom, and a family struggling to find its way out of silence and back to one another.

About Catherine Chung

Catherine Chung was born in Evanston, Illinois, during one of the worst blizzards on record, and grew up in New York, New Jersey, and Michigan. She was named one of Granta’s New Voices and is the recipient of a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

About Emily Woo Zeller

Emily Woo Zeller is an Audie and Earphones Award–winning narrator, voice-over artist, actor, dancer, and choreographer. AudioFile magazine named her one of the Best Voices of 2013. Her voice-over career includes work in animated film and television in Southeast Asia.


Reviews

Goodreads review by J.L.

“Each life contains as much meaning as all of history.” Catherine Chung’s Forgotten Country is the story of a family who leaves Korea and begins a new life in the U.S. Told from the perspective of Janie, the oldest of two daughters, Chung explores what it means to leave something behind, whether tha......more

Goodreads review by Ciara

the reviews & jacket copy for this book were very misleading. check them out--they say thatjanie's sister hannah mysteriously "goes missing" & in the process of searching for her, janie stumbles across a "family secret" about how every generation of her family "loses a daughter". i was definitely an......more


Awards

  • Indie Next List
  • Kirkus Reviews “New and Notable Title”
  • Booklist Top 10
  • BookPage Best Book
  • San Francisco Chronicle Best Book
  • PEN/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award