Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin

When I began to read Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin, my original notion was that this was going to be an awful book. I’ve never read a book written in second person before and found it very difficult to get into. However, after pushing through a couple pages I got used to seeing "you" and carried on with the rest of the book. Another confusing thing about reading the book was how it would jump around in time without giving an indication that we were changing.  I’ve read plenty of books that changed times but it was usually indicated by a couple of *** between chapters or at least a sentence like “Then I thought back on an experience I had as a child…” Please look after mom often made no clear indication it was about to change times and I often caught myself re-reading paragraphs to make sense of it.

This is a book full of self-evaluation and regret. When the family originally discovers their mothers disappearance they all try to blame each other for the loss, but as the story progresses they realize that they never really knew their mother. “Mom was just, Mom” They didn’t see her as someone who had once been a child, who could have feelings and desires outside her family. And even after years of reading and writing letters for their mother, they had never thought that she might be illiterate.

As they try to find their mother physically the characters begin to seek her emotionally. Knowing they never truly knew her they begin to regret how they had treated their mother and think of all the things they should have done differently, and in the final chapter, the mother is running through all the things she should have done differently.

So the moral of the story, take care of your family; if you don’t take the time to find who they are now, you've already lost them. In the words of Garth Brooks “If tomorrow never comes, will she know how much I love her.”