3.5 Stars

I listened to this audiobook and it has stuck with me for days.
It is the story of a man and his family. When something tragic happens to his parents, he and his wife take them in to their home. Secrets are revealed, past traumas are confronted, and the couple soon learn many truths about each other.
It is mildly disturbing, fyi, but ultimately the focus is less on the events and more on the people affected by them.
This is an excellent book. I recommend it.

So perfectly encapsulating of everything insidiously wrong with the Asian American experience in its most extreme, everything fucked up with the model minority myth, with the imported repressed beliefs and behaviors that I still struggle to understand and make peace with (utter obedience and respect, filial piety, patriarchal familial structures). Mixed feelings about Jin still beating Mae after all these years, although the reasoning makes sense (that she was about to leave him, and that he was unable to come to terms with this in any sort of well-adjusted manner). Kyung is so, so, so...SO fucked up. The kind beyond saving and past change, the kind that makes me wonder if he was always going to turn out this way—but that's the thing, we'll never know, because he was so shaped and so traumatized by his childhood and the way he was raised, and bears such a massive fucking chip on his shoulder, like Connie said, about everything. Maybe a better person would have been able to rise above the occasion, but not Kyung, and that's what made the story so sordid and yet so hard hitting.

So very heartachingly human. The main character has few redeemable qualities aside from his ability to self-reflect but the reader pulls for him anyway. He's not a bad guy; instead, he's a flawed human with the seemingly sisyphean task of moving forward. The pat ending felt off, though.

The debut novel, Shelter, by Jung Yun is a troubling and complex novel of deep family fault lines and huge secrets, As with other readers, I found that I couldn’t put it down until the denouement was laid out for the reader in a most emotional and intelligent way. It was definitely worth tolerating the least likable characters in the novel to figure out what the effects of what seemed liked standard cultural differences was actually anger, resentment, and lived locked up tight for many years. The end carried the weight of people’s lives and fates in its closing and offered hope, if only for the sake of the child.

There were a lot of hard things in this book and I wished the protagonist had more strength of character. I could see the cause of his weakness so that was a mitigating factor. He struggles to take care of his parents, who failed to properly care for him. I loved the writing.

3.5

An enjoyable, quick read that investigates family trauma with break-neck pacing and a haunting mystery.