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babybearreads 's review for:
Your House Will Pay
by Steph Cha
challenging
emotional
tense
medium-paced
I've been wanting to read this book for a while, and that it was chosen as a California Book Club pick was the extra push I needed. John Freeman facilitated a wildly interesting discussion with Steph Cha and said that Your House Will Pay goes down in the canon, and changes the trajectory of what crime fiction can do.
The story thrusts us in the middle of the tension between, and pain within, the Black and Korean communities of LA which came to a head at the murder of Latasha Harlins by Soon Ja-Du in 1991 and Korean businesses becoming one target of the 1992 Uprising. Based on this real event, we travel to the present in this story where another act of violence shocks a family and is interpreted as veangance. I heard myself describing this book + events as complicated, meaty, so difficult. And I thought about how people with privilege may never come across such a complicated situation in their lives, and the threat of prison is very distant.
How do you deal when you discover horrible family secrets, or when justice isn't served? In the real world, as in this book, the story isn't neatly tied up with a bow; forgiveness isn't really given. The history and the pain is accepted and shouldered.
The story thrusts us in the middle of the tension between, and pain within, the Black and Korean communities of LA which came to a head at the murder of Latasha Harlins by Soon Ja-Du in 1991 and Korean businesses becoming one target of the 1992 Uprising. Based on this real event, we travel to the present in this story where another act of violence shocks a family and is interpreted as veangance. I heard myself describing this book + events as complicated, meaty, so difficult. And I thought about how people with privilege may never come across such a complicated situation in their lives, and the threat of prison is very distant.
How do you deal when you discover horrible family secrets, or when justice isn't served? In the real world, as in this book, the story isn't neatly tied up with a bow; forgiveness isn't really given. The history and the pain is accepted and shouldered.