Status
Call number
Publication
DDC/MDS
| 813.54 |
Description
Highly acclaimed by critics, The Foreign Student is the story of a young Korean man, scarred by war, and the deeply troubled daughter of a wealthy Southern American family. In 1955, a new student arrives at a small college in the Tennessee mountains. Chuck is shy, speaks English haltingly, and on the subject of his earlier life in Korea he will not speak at all. Then he meets Katherine, a beautiful and solitary young woman who, like Chuck, is haunted by some dark episode in her past. Without quite knowing why, these two outsiders are drawn together, each sensing in the other the possibility of salvation. Moving between the American South and South Korea, between an adolescent girl's sexual awakening and a young man's nightmarish memories of war, The Foreign Student is a powerful and emotionally gripping work of fiction.… (more)
User reviews
Yes, excellent character development and emotional landscape; Choi doesn't stop with two incredibly detailed and alive characters, but weaves in Charles, Glee, Chang's roommate — even small glimpses like the few lines
I believe what I like best is that the two characters are on two arcs of self-development — you know exactly what happened to Katherine's life to derail her fairly early on in the novel, and you spend the rest of the time rooting for her to break free. Chang's narrative circles around his war experience in flashbacks, heading toward something earth-shattering. And then the really earth-shattering thing turns out to be him walking away from Korea (which you know from the beginning, as he starts the novel in Tennessee).