Reviews of House of the Winds

House of the Winds is not a novel to be rushed through.  One must read slowly, savoring each word, each phrase, each sentence.  The reader is simply stunned by the freshness of the language…

 Mia Yun’s work ranks with such classics as The Diary of Anne Frank and Letters of a Javanese Princess by Kartini.  It belongs on the shelf with the best of contemporary world literature and in any women’s studies collection.  Seldom do we see work that is so true, so moving, so well written. – World Literature Today, Autumn 1998

A Korean-American writer’s limpid first novel records the progress of its unnamed narrator’s girlhood in Seoul in the early 1960s. Her doting mother (long known as “Young Wife”‘) is a bewitching repository of fanciful tales festooned with magical-realist drollery: birds cry rather than sing, and butterflies house the souls of children who have died in their sleep. Subtly linked episodes are dominated by such vivid figures as Young Wife’s own mother, an “infamous hypochondriac” and inexhaustible fount of stories;  infrequent visits from “who was said to be my father”; an irreverent peddler (the Falstaffian “Pumpkin Wife”); a house haunted by weeping women ghosts; and the narrator’s saddened farewells to her parents and siblings on embarkation to America. A lovely, lyrical coming-of-age tale, graced by judiciously blended notes of humor and melancholy. A superlative debut. – Kirkus Reviews , November 1, 1998, Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Mia Yun’s lush, evocative novel of her childhood in 1960s South Korea begins with one beautiful but ordinary image: herself, as a child, standing in her mother’s cabbage patch, watching a butterfly hovering over the flowers, wings… transparent pieces of white silk in the sunlight.”  In the intricate story she spins out from this golden, peaceful moment in a garden, Yun shows that she has a poet’s sense of the mot juste, a painter’s instinct for arresting imagery, and a storyteller’s flair for melodrama.  Her images come crowded with color and plangent with pathos: “Moonflowers bloomed at the end of a long, heat-hushed afternoon, when dusk came softly and swiftly, steadily dripping persimmon red and azalea pink over the tiled rooftops.”  Amid the flood of metaphors, there are sharply observed characters rendered with a deft instinct for the absurdity of life, adding up to a wry, richly textured portrait of life in a place and time that already feels bygone, though close enough to be part of living memory. -S. R. Shutt, Boston Review -Vol. 23, N. 6 December/January 1998-99

The story of a girl’s childhood in Korea, Yun’s first novel is a warm and vivid reminiscence of the relationship between a girl and her mother.  The Korea of her memories was occupied by the Japanese, whose harsh rule was followed by the devastation of the Korean War.  Young Wife, her  mother,  is a quietly courageous woman who keeps her three children together.  Though abandoned by her husband, she manages to provide food, clothing, shelter, and schooling while she nourishes the children’s souls with tales of a forgotten peaceful time in Korea: a time when tigers smoked pipes and history, tradition, and magic blended together to create an exciting and viable culture. Eloquently written in language that is both metaphorical and poetic, this is an excellent addition to the series. – Janis Williams, LIBRARY JOURNAL, October 1, 1998

This is a novel full of beautiful and vivid description: the shape of fruit, the play of light, the sensuous qualities of water, warmth, touch. The narrator is the youngest child of three in a family in Korea in the 1960s. Central to her story is her mother: strong, sweet, and upright against the forces of poverty and the usually absent father,one who dreams and promises but cannot deliver. Much is made of the life of dreams, of the gossip of neighbors like the cackling Pumpkin Wife, of the moves into ever less desirable housing. What we also participate in here, though, is the life of children longing for sweets, playing in the sun, wondering about the mysteries of their relatives. It is very close in its intensity and its themes to Linda Watanabe McFerrin’s Namako (about a Japanese girl and her family) and Gail Tsukiyama’s Night of Many Dreams (about a Chinese girl and her family in Hong Kong). – Booklist , September 15, 1998 GraceAnne A. DeCandido Copyright© 1998, American Library Association. All rights reserved.

“A rich and pervasive child’s memory colors the pages… the story bends and weaves its colors like a needle creating an embroidery. Richly written…fanciful.” – Korean Quarterly

“A meditation on the weight of history, a work that’s both personal and epic in scope.” – Amy Kroin, The Valley Advocate

“Mia Yun has achieved the remarkable leap that enables her to write in a second language as if it were  her  first — in short, she (like Nabokov, like our late friend Jerzy Kosinski) is in possession of two languages…  In House of the Winds, her imagination flowers into startlingly fresh imagery.  Her sentences are pure, simple, exquisitely shaded: they have the eerie, airy quality (eerie in the sense of being both distant and near) of Chinese or Japanese scroll paintings.

“It is probably no accident that I say Chinese or Japanese, since when we think of Asia,it is China and Japan that come most quickly to mind, and now that Asian-American voices are at last being heard in American writing, it is the writers of these backgrounds we mainly take note of.  But Mia Yun is from Korea (‘a small ethnic background,’ she calls it), and her experience is different.  Her moving and surprising –and unique — Korean stories merit attention on their own account, and cannot be stereotypically lumped under ‘Asian.’  Surely it is time for Mia Yun’s distinctive and enriching talent, rooted in a vision utterly new to our marveling eyes, to find the wider recognition it deserves.” – Cynthia Ozick, author The Messiah of Stockholm, The Shawl, et al

“House of the Winds is Mia Yun’s beautifully told story of a young girl growing up in a Korea emerging from the devastation of occupation and civil war.  Intertwining memory, myth, ream and imagination, the young narrator captures a world in which the old and the new, the innocent and the cunning, the East and the West, all clash and embrace.  It is a world of stories — of a charming, absentee father; an ambitious opera-singing sister; a beloved and wise mother; and an adored brother… Each chapter is like a panel of a delicately painted screen, depicting a small — and exotic, to Western eyes — world unto itself.  But ultimately, Yun unfolds the screen to reveal a much larger — and unexpectedly familiar — vista.”  – Rebecca Stowe, author Not the End of the World and The Shadow of Desire

“Through the haunting and evocative prose of Mia Yun’s fine novel we see, feel and know a Korea which until now, despite our participation in its modern day civil war, has yet remained hidden from us.  She beautifully melds Korea’s enduring strength, achievements, and above all, its tragic past within an almost contemporary setting.  She is especially concerned that in the telling of her country’s history, an all-important group has been left out.  She writes:  ‘Korea seemed… a bloodied Eden full of the voiceless souls of women…’  Mia Yun’s is one Korean woman who will be heard.” – Barney Rosset, founder Grove Press and publisher of the Evergreen Review