Liar, Dreamer, Thief

November 1, 2022
In Dong's vertiginous debut, a mentally unstable woman stumbles across a conspiracy. After Katrina Kim flunks out of college, she returns to her family's home in Pleasance Village, Illinois, seeking solace; her father sends her away, however, suggesting Katrina stay at a hotel or a friend's house. Katrina goes to the local library and parks, curling up in her car's back seat while her mind retreats into Mi-Hee and the Mirror-Man, her favorite Korean children's book. Like Katrina, Mi-Hee is a lonely girl with compulsive tendencies, but Mi-Hee can access a fantasy world via her kitchen door and has a truth-revealing spyglass. Determined to create her own new existence, Katrina drives to Grand Station, gets an office job, and moves in with a stranger who saw her plea for help on Craigslist and took pity. The stress proves too much, and Katrina starts dissociating, layering Mi-Hee's "kitchen-door world over [her] own, like a colored pane of glass." She develops elaborate protection rituals and starts following co-worker Kurt Smith because she thinks they're connected. Then, one night on the Cayatoga Bridge, Katrina sees Kurt crash his SUV. He extricates himself, screams at Katrina for ruining things, and jumps off the railing. Katrina tells the police, who dismiss her, but when Kurt misses work on Monday, Katrina launches her own investigation, uncovering a reality far stranger than her inner fictions. Events unfold courtesy of Katrina's anxious, unmoored first-person present narration, keeping readers off-kilter. Some characters lack depth and verisimilitude, but Katrina's fraught relationship with her immigrant parents rings true. Though the setup drags on, sapping the book's momentum, once the mystery drops into gear, increasingly bonkers twists propel the story to a cogent, poignant close. A rabbit hole worth falling down.

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Starred review from November 7, 2022
Broke and estranged from her Korean family, Katrina Kim, the narrator of Dong’s mesmerizing debut, works a dead-end job at a soulless Illinois hospital billing firm. Her deepening reliance on OCD behaviors and her fear that the magical kingdom of a childhood book is becoming real throw her life into chaos, as does her obsession with her more successful colleague, Kurt Smith. Though Katrina and Kurt have barely spoken, the books and music she discovers searching his desk convince her that they’re kindred souls. One day, she finds a postcard with a threatening message in his desk drawer. Terrified it’s directed at her, she drives at midnight to the bridge she regularly visits, to perform the most potent of her self-soothing rituals. Then Kurt shows up, shouts some words of blame, and jumps to his death. Katrina is horrified and baffled. How does he know of Katrina’s visits to the bridge? Was he surveilling her even as she surveilled him—and who is he really? Katrina’s search for answers reveals secrets all around her. This nuanced depiction of a woman’s struggles with isolation and mental health rings entirely true. Fans of sharp, inventive fiction will be eager for Dong’s next. Agent: Amy Bishop, Dystel, Goderich & Bourret.

November 1, 2022
In Dong's fascinating and psychologically complicated first novel, readers will be left wondering about the hidden inner lives of those closest to them. Protagonist Katrina Kim embodies an exploration of mental illness that blurs the lines between coping and obsession. Attempting to balance her personal life, including estrangement from her parents, a rundown car, and debilitating compulsions, with her work life as a temp who is under constant threat of being fired and dangerously obsessed with Kurt, a co-worker whom she sees leap to his death, Katrina finds herself tangled up in Kurt's trouble and conducting an inquiry that unravels in confounding, even unbelievable ways. Murder, spying, lying, and stealing all converge to keep readers on their toes in this fast-paced tale as they confront a tumultuous and baffling series of events. From start to finish, this is a captivating story with dire puzzles that beg to be solved one chapter at a time while readers will continuously wonder whether Dong's narrator can be relied on at all, making for yet another intriguing mystery.

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