He’s not a good son; he knows this already. But he’s the best possible version of the son they raised him to be. Present, but not adoring. Helpful, but not generous. Obligated and nothing more.
A friend gave me Shelter to read, because she wanted to have someone to talk about its twists and turns with, so I should begin by acknowledging that this kind of domestic-drama-rollercoaster is not my usual genre; fans of this type of thing might find it entirely entertaining. As it is, I found this to be poorly written, gratuitously violent, implausibly twisty, and knock-over-the-head moralistic: yes, it's hard to be loving when you grew up in a house without love; compounding that message with stereotypical cultural overtones doesn't elevate the message. Not recommended.
The only thing Ethan had ever done was arrive in this world needing him, and the greatest failure of Kyung's life, the one he felt daily, was not knowing how to respond. The part of him that wanted to be a good father was constantly at odds with the part that didn't have one, leaving him with only two defaults as a parent – correcting Ethan or keeping him at a careful distance. Although his methods often changed from one minute to the next, his intentions were always the same. He wanted his son to turn out so much better than he did.
Kyung Cho is a thirty-six-year-old tenure-tracked professor; the husband of an Irish-American woman currently studying for a degree in social work; and father to a lovely four-year-old son. Kyung is also heavily in debt – maxing out credit cards for beach vacations, owing more on his mortgage than his home is worth, still paying off his student loans – and all of his domestic stresses are multiplied by his home's proximity to his rich Korean immigrant parents; people he rarely visits without ever having told his wife why. When the parents experience a (needlessly horrific) violent event in their home and must temporarily relocate to Kyong's much smaller house, family secrets will finally be revealed. Other than restating that the plot only gets more convoluted from here – while doing nothing to entertain nor enlighten the reader – that's all I'm going to say about that.
I would like to point out that I really didn't like the writing in this book: Kyung is a totally unsympathetic main character (explaining that he had a hard childhood doesn't absolve his current behaviours; nothing could explain his initial reaction to seeing his mother stumbling towards his house through the connecting green space); I didn't believe the pointlessly bizarre turn his mother's life takes; and I didn't believe that a four year old, playing with the puzzle that he's apparently been obsessing over for months, mistakenly calls the grapes piece “raisins” when his mother asks him what it's a picture of. I hated the following early passage and will leave it here as representative of what bothered me about Jung Yun's writing:
A woman jogs by with two children in a running stroller, the littler of whom offers Kyung a wave that he doesn't return.
Don't follow “littler” (not necessarily a crime in itself) with “whom” if you want us to get along. At least this was short.
