Folklorn

January 25, 2021
Blurring the lines between sci-fi and fantasy, Hur’s sophomore novel (after The Queens of K-Town) offers a complex meditation on intergenerational trauma. While working at the Amundsen Scott South Pole Station, Korean-American physicist Elsa Park suffers sudden tinnitus and sees her imaginary friend from childhood. This sparks memories of the time Elsa’s mother gave her a now lost collection of four Korean folktales and warned her that all the women in their family are doomed to live out their plots. To understand what’s happening to her, Elsa consults Oskar Gantelius, a Swedish Korean adoptee and linguistics professor who specializes in Korean folktales and also serves as Elsa’s love interest, though their relationship is given little development. But before the pair can make sense of Elsa’s episodes, her mother dies, driving Elsa to find the folktales and figure out how to apply them to her own life. The honest look at prickly Elsa’s internalized racism is ambitious but often brutal in its unflinching execution, and the third act twist relies on an outdated take on mental illness. Despite the unconvincing romance between Oskar and Elsa, their conversations on minority life in majority white spaces are painfully accurate. This thought-provoking work will appeal to SFF
fans who like their talk of particle physics side by side with fox spirits and fairy tales. Agent: Sarah Bedingfield, Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary Agency.

March 15, 2021
A Korean American physicist with a postdoc position in Stockholm grapples with the real and imagined ghosts of her family's past. Elsa Park's time in the Antarctic conducting research on neutrinos is coming to an end, punctuated by the reappearance of a specter from her past: a girl who has played with her, advised her, and followed her since she was a child. Though Elsa left her home just outside Los Angeles for boarding school and eventually her position in Sweden, her friend's reappearance heralds a return to her old life in California, centered around her father's crumbling auto body shop, where she must confront the complicated ties that bind her to her father, mother, and older brother. Hanging over all this are the stories her mother told--and didn't tell--dark tales of girls sacrificed for bells, girls lost at sea, girls used. Who is Elsa's friend really, since no one else can see her, and what does she mean for their family? Oskar Gantelius, a Korean adoptee Elsa met in Sweden, may hold the key to her questions if she can manage to make sense of all the stories. Ruminations on physics are interspersed with Korean folktales, though intergenerational trauma means the narrative can never soar into whimsy for long. Elements of magical realism are tempered well by the realities of one Korean immigrant family. Though Elsa is often an unlikable narrator, her story is gripping and rings as true as the bell she hears in her mind. A quiet but compelling rumination on family, race, and trauma, built on the spaces in Korean folktales.

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