Read as part of CBR15Bingo: Oceania. The writer is of Korean descent, the two POV characters are of Korean descent, and the book is about the experience of Korean-Americans and Koreans in diaspora.
I was in New York for Linsanity. Not a fan of the Knicks but it was an out-of-body experience at the time. You were glued to your tv every night and every night for almost two weeks, it delivered. Even my father-in-law — a lifelong Knicks Hater — was inclined to root for them just for Jeremy Lin.
So with that experience in mind, A Sense of Wonder was a false start (pardon the sports analogy) for me.
I just couldn’t figure out what Matthew Salesses was doing. He seemed to be embittered by the fallout of Linsanity (and Carmelo Anthony’s supposed role in particular) and took it out through an uninteresting character in a clunky story.
I quit the first time but I came back. I liked what I’d read in the past from Salesses on writing: challenging commonly-held plotting and characterization concepts. I figured he was doing something different than I’m used to and went back with a different, less-Linsanity skewed perspective. And I was able to see the forest past the trees.
Because Salesses is using the Linsanity narrative in one story along with K-drama production in another to tell a greater story about Koreans (and adjacently, Asian-Americans) in a way that was quite moving in spots and educational in others. He has a gift with words and some of the ways he would describe how Koreans view wonder really connected with me on a deep level. Salesses is very good at exploring spaces between what is true and what is possible. Such a short book and it meditatively touched on racism, adoption, #MeToo, the sports/entertainment complexes, and so much more.
There were things that I felt could have been better fleshed out, Sung and Brit’s characters in particular. I know we only see them through the eyes of the POVs but still. Nevertheless, this wound up being a great book, one of the best things I’ve read in 2023. And I would’ve never guessed that would happen after my first try with it.
