Mina is a Korean immigrant to the United States, fleeing a country that has robbed her of her family twice; first, separated from her parents as a young child fleeing the North, and second when her husband and daughter are killed in an accident. She enters the US on a holiday visa with no plans to leave.

Margot is Mina’s American-born daughter. Speaking little Korean with no awareness of Mina’s past, or even who her own father is, they have a fractured relationship.

This is a story about the secrets that can exist between friends and family, about how you can never truly know everything about anyone, and about the regrets that come when you don’t make the effort to speak or to try and understand.

I felt sorry for Margot and for the regret she felt throughout the book, but I felt worse for Mina. She worked so hard to overcome so much grief, escaped to a country where she didn’t speak the language and knew very few people with only the hope of working hard enough to be able to stay. I understand that as a young child Margot may have been resentful, her mother being different, not having much money, having to help out at work. But you’d hope that as she grew older, moved away for university, and gained some perspective, maybe she’d be more understanding of what her mother had been through as an undocumented single mother. Instead, she just seemed spoiled and stubborn. Even the rarely mentioned two-month relationship that she was so broken up about seemed fairly pathetic. Everything was always so overwhelming, I just wanted to shake her and tell her to grow up.