A Cab Called Reliable
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
An extraordinary debut and exciting new voice in multicultural fiction, Patti Kim's A Cab Called Reliable
Winner of the Towson University Prize for Literature
Nominated for the Book-of-the-Month Club's Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction
Ahn Joo Cho emigrated with her family from Korea to Virginia at the age of seven. Two years later, a cab called 'Reliable' took away her mother and her infant brother forever.
Grade by grade in school, Ahn Joo comes of age within an alien society, excelling at creative writing as her home life with her old-fashioned father deteriorates. Language heals her, and saves her. As Ahn Joo enters womanhood, a heart-breaking secret finally sets her free to create her own heritage.
This widely celebrated debut novel approaches growing up in America—whether as an immigrant or a native—from an honest, refreshingly authentic perspective.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ahn Joo Cho is eight when she sees her mother and baby brother enter a cab that pulls away from the Arlington, Va., apartment where the immigrant Korean family lives. Ahn Joo finds a cryptic note telling her to wait patiently, for her mother will come back, and this promise sustains her over the next few years as she cares for her alcoholic and often abusive father and puts up with his young live-in lover. But as time passes and she helps her father with his vending cart on the streets of Washington, D.C., Ahn Joo's bewilderment over her mother's abandonment is reflected in her schoolwork and peer relationships. Kim's sensitive debut novella gives Ahn Joo an appealing vulnerability under a fiercely independent facade. As she yearns for her absent mother, Ahn Joo gives voice to her anguish in stories and poems that allow her to sift through memories of her parents' strained relationship. The growing conflict between Ahn Joo and her earnest but uneducated father eventually unearths a secret that lays to rest many questions about Mrs. Cho's desertion and allows Ahn Joo to understand her father's misery. Several other loose ends are left dangling, however, including an ambiguous child-abuse subplot and an insubstantial ending in which escape is too easily equated with freedom.
