[In the following review, Leber praises Choi's story-telling skills.]

First-novelist Choi blends unlikely elements into a resonant story that immerses the reader in the times, places, and lives of her characters as only the best fiction can. In the small college town of Sewanee, Tennessee, in 1955, a feisty southern belle meets a Korean student, but their pasts stand in the way of their mutual attraction. Katherine Monroe has spent half her life in love with the most prominent professor on campus, a man 28 years her senior and a friend of her parents, who first bedded her when she was 14. And Chang Ahn, a former translator for USIS who was caught in the ravages of his country's war, has escaped Korea but not his nightmares. In prose that is alternately spare and lush, Choi constructs a plot that only gradually reveals the horrors Chang has endured, at the same time raising the possibility of a happy future. Expect word-of-mouth and book-club interest in this accomplished, perceptive novel, which invites rereading and lingers in the reader's memory.