Reflections on Kyung-Sook Shin's 'Please Look After Mother'

Please Look After Mom
(Vintage Contemporaries)

I finished reading Kyung-Sook Shin's 'Please Look After Mother' at work earlier. It wasn't queuing so I had time to read.

Many times I paused from reading because tears were slowly coming out. All I could do is stop reading, stare at the ceiling for awhile and hope my seatmate did not notice my slight sobbing.

When I read Sputnik Sweetheart

How do I even begin. First, the title was cheesy. I heard about the book from a friend who was reading Fifty Shades at that time. At first, I thought it was of the same genre, my apologies. That has always been one of my flaws, being judgmental to people, book titles and reading choices. I am trying my best to be a changed person now though.

So there was the story, SS. I first read a HM book years ago before the incident, out of whim, and before the SJ era. I even forgot the title of that book. The only feeling that the book left me was of confusion. The girl in the story somehow disappeared and vanished in her room??! That story was also narrated through a male's point of view. Is this a recurring theme in HM books? Well, maybe I am getting ahead of myself.

Here are my thoughts/realizations/and fifty cents on the book SS by HM:

Judy Blume’s Otherwise Known as Sheila The Great, A review

Dogs, spiders, swimming, ghost stories, thunderstorms, eerie sounds at night, what else? Sheila Tubman fears a lot of things. These things may be trivial to most of us, but to Sheila it was a matter of life and death.

I read Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great today as a light reading. It indeed was! I breezed through it in a couple of hours. I would have finished it sooner if I wasn't laughing so hard at Sheila. Haha! This girl, her ridiculous reasoning when it comes to the things she fears and things she could not admit she can’t do, reminds me so much of my younger self. Fear of dogs, eerie sounds at night, covering ones ears at night… LOL that is so me. And her inner dialogue, speaking so matter of factly of the things or situations she is in, and her tirades with her sister and parents, all these speak so true to me.

Like Sheila The Great, we both are learning and adapting, little by little. I am older now, I am no longer that afraid of dogs, but I still cover my ears when I sleep because I am sure that a monster is coming to get me if I ears are shown ;-P

Well, that is Judy Blume to us. She writes these things eloquently as if I am reading my own story and my own thoughts.  And Mouse, Jane & Sondra, Marty, summer classes, Newsdate, the play with Liddy being cast as Captain Hook instead of being Wendy (I had a laughing fit with this!), truly I wouldn’t forget this summer at Tarrytown.

Read August 29, 2012.