The Future Perfect

Told in the second person, this debut novel follows a daughter from before she is born. Cay Kim begins in the womb, where the child is already her mother's vision of the future, and then tracks the girl as her family moves back and forth between Korea and the United States.

Her mother gives up her own happiness for her daughter's prospects. Childhood becomes a round of homework, violin practice and academic achievement, all meant to shape the girl into the person her mother most wants her to be. The book asks whether this devotion is the fullest kind of love, and what it costs both of them.

Stuck between a motherland and a homeland, the young woman has to work out whether any place exists between the two that she can call her own. The novel follows what she loses and what she finds as she struggles to succeed, and it is as much about girlhood and family as about the big dreams people carry with them, wherever they come from.