reviews & events

Reviews & advance praise for If You Live in a Small House

If You Live in a Small House achieves escape velocity from the sentimentality that often characterizes period novels of Hawaii, largely through an immanent sense of wonder and mystery. The book’s father figure, a veteran of WWII in Europe, didn’t find his way home so easily, and his family longs to be allowed into his secret world of adventure in warfare, and in women. This tension extends to the rest of the multi-generational family, and the novel explores our unceasing explorations, our journeys in search of those we hold most dear.

–Ragnar Carlson, Honolulu Weekly

Sandra Park's poetic new novella, If You Live in a Small House, reveals multiple hidden worlds: the small-town ways of Kailua (and Hawai'i) in the early 1950s, before statehood and during the Korean War; the perspective of Korean Americans in Hawai'i, several generations after their arrival; and the rich interior life of multigenerational family living together but growing apart.

—Jeanne Cooper, SF Gate/SF Chronicle

Park's modernist story If You Live in a Small House is an important

and beautiful chronicle of American lives too little known to us. Park's stunning novella is capacious as is the story's tender heart.

—Min Jin Lee, author of Free Food for Millionaires

The authenticity of Park's characters, their food, their clothes, their

expressions, brings immigrant family life in Hawaii poetically alive.

Most poignant is the father with his WWII memories and losing his

friends to suicide missions, and his fear that his son will be sent to

Korea to fight enemies who “look like him.” A compelling reading

experience.

—Kiana Davenport, author of Shark Dialogues

and House of Many Gods

Completely avoiding the trappings of noisy, multigenerational family

melodrama, this rich psychological narrative instead delves into the

private longings of these characters. Beautifully told, If You Live in a Small House is the work of a truly gifted writer.

—Chris McKinney, author of The Queen of Tears

and Bolohead Row

Sandra Park writes with a generosity and clarity of vision that is both great-hearted and splendidly unsentimental. Nothing escapes her gaze. The writing is fresh and urgent, the language lyrical, the characters alive and kicking on the page. An utterly compelling read from the very first sentence, Small House is an auspicious debut for one of America’s most promising new writers.

—Alice LaPlante, author of Method and Madness:

The Making of a Story and Turn of Mind

A hauntingly beautiful prose poem that opens the door to a hidden

world and a forgotten moment, If You Live in a Small House is

thoughtful, tender, and not to be missed.

—Patricia O'Toole, author of The Five of Hearts and

When Trumpets Call

Sandra Park blends action and reverie to evoke the texture and mood of postwar Hawaii in the lives of one Korean immigrant family. Reading If You Live in a Small House is like standing in Keaniani Lane after dark, peeking through the windows of the “funny kind house.”

—Mary Helen Stefaniak, author of The Cailiffs of

Baghdad, Georgia and The Turk and My Mother

Sandra Park’s novel is beautifully told. She is flawless in evoking the atmosphere of the early 1950s, when Kailua was still the country, the Korean Conflict taking sons and fathers who survived the previous war, prosperity a glimmer just visible on the horizon. With subtle humor and tender regard for her characters, Park brings to life an ohana-household with barely room enough for their desires, hopes, and losses. Suspended in the lull before the tsunami of statehood, between forgetfulness and anticipation, Park’s lyrical novel is a small miracle of remembrance.

—Frank Stewart, editor of Manoa Journal and

author of By All Means

Mesmerizing. Park’s language is magical—her precise, yet fable-like descriptions draw the reader into a world both new and familiar. When I finally set the book aside, I felt as if I was waking from a dream.

—Shawna Yang Ryan, author of Water Ghosts

A captivating portrait of an island family whose troubles and loves are a spicy mix of heartbreak, hilarity, and pure intoxication.

—Steve Stern, author of The Wedding Jester

and The Angel of Forgetfulness

This lovely novella evokes a lush poetry of the everyday. I admire the perfect economy of Sandra Park’s writing, its richness of character, and her decision not to examine the tsunami’s destruction, but rather the eerie beauty of the withdrawn sea that precedes it. Gloria says of Dante, “Looking is loving: I could look at you all day long.” The reader will feel a similar affection for the book.

—Paul Hoover, author of Sonnet 56 and

Poems in Spanish

In the tradition of Sandra Cisneros’s House on Mango Street and Toshio Mori’s Yokohama, California, Park’s linked vignettes provide us with glimpses of her characters’ everyday lives and even their lifelong fantasies but, like the white-bordered, period photographs that accompany them, remind us that much lies outside our field of vision. While we come to understand that most of her characters’ dreams will go unfulfilled, and while we come to sympathize with their losses and yearning, Park’s book ultimately asks us to consider what historical and social forces shape the community of 1950s Kailua.

—Floyd Cheung, American Studies,

Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts

Park's narrative enfolds the complexity of a multi-ethnic island

community, the histories of Asian immigration and settlement, and the presence of the United States military without subsuming the central exploration of the family's private dreams and experiences. She has achieved a wonderful balance between these larger historical narratives and the interiority of her characters, and her writing offers a stunning example of how political and cultural questions can exist harmoniously with aesthetic and narrative mastery.

—Paul Lai, Asian American Literature,

University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota

Author Events

Mon, Sept 20, 2010, 1:00 pm PST

Writer’s Sanctuary

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