When it comes to young adult novels about Korean American teens, Marie Myung-Ok Lee seems to have the market cornered. Beginning with 1992’s Finding My Voice, Lee wrote four well-received novels with titles like If It Hadn’t Been for Yoon Jun and F is for Fabuloso, all of which featured Korean American protagonists. Now Lee has completed her first adult novel, Somebody’s Daughter (Beacon Press, April 2005), about a Korean American adoptee and the search for her birth mother.

Making the transition to adult fiction can have its own growing pains. At times, it seems as though Lee is still locked in the world of adolescent fiction. The childish, immature bickering of the classmates in the protagonist’s Korean language class, for example, seems like something from one of Lee’s earlier high school novels. There are also a few maddening passages about Korea that seem like a throwback to old-school "Fortune Cookie" fiction. However, Somebody’s Daughter is able to stay the course as an engrossing and worthwhile book, thanks to the strength of Lee’s fine writing.

It is 1993 and 19-year-old Sarah Thorson has been raised for most of her life in a white Lutheran family in Minnesota. Sarah, who knows more about Norwegian lutefisk than the average person, grows up desiring to have "blue eyes, creamy white skin, golden hair." Meanwhile, "Korea" is a charged word that never gets mentioned by her adoptive parents, "the same way we never said ‘Uncle Henry’ and ‘alcoholic’ in the same sentence," Sarah notes. After impulsively dropping out of the University of Minnesota, Sarah travels to her birthplace to enroll at a Korean university, study the language and begin the search for her birth mother.

Marie Lee, author of four young adult books, has written her first adult novel, Somebody’s Daughter.

The novel cuts back and forth from Sarah’s story to that of Kyung-Sook, a middle-aged Korean woman from the country who has flashbacks to her past. Journeying from her small village to the big city of Seoul in the 1960s, Kyung-Sook is forced to work at a restaurant. There, she falls in love with an American Peace Corps volunteer and becomes pregnant.

It is in the Kyung-Sook chapters that the story falters, sometimes painting an unintentional caricature of Korea that is reminiscent of author Pearl S. Buck, who would use archaic, Biblical language in her novels about Asia. Likewise, Lee writes Korean dialogue in English with solemn, majestic tones (even for the cussing, low-class characters), making Koreans seem like a primitive, yet noble race. One more weighty pronouncement and I felt like blowing up a venerable Confucian shrine. For example, Lee writes that one character’s pregnancy was thanks to her "hundred days of prayers to the Birth Goddess and the Seven-Star God, the bestowers of male children." Even for readers who know little or no Korean, reading about how Korean names mean "Virtuous Modesty," "Small Singing" or "Gentle Customer" or that Kyung-Sook needs directions to the "underground-iron-train" — i.e. the subway — smacks of an auto-Orientalism that is disheartening.