In Please Look After Mom, Kyung-Sook Shin has delivered a stark, beautiful book about the loss of a mother and the complexity of family relationships, all set against the backdrop of a rapidly modernizing South Korea. Her simple but moving prose is presented elegantly, with just a touch of magical realism.

When their elderly mother accidently disappears into the crowded streets of Seoul, the family bands together to try to track her down. Her country upbringing, illiteracy, and mild dementia don't make the task easy and, for most of the novel, we are left crossing our fingers, hoping that the fliers, newspaper ads, and occasional tips will return her safe and sound.

Shin takes a unique stance on structure and grammar, as different members of the family tell their own versions of the story in second-person narrative. At first, the second-person can seem foreign and awkward, but eventually this lifts to reveal a feeling of intimacy.

The rotating voices give a 360 degree holistic view of the event, revealing new details while allowing the family to be at once its parts and the sum of its parts. Perspectives shift from sibling to sibling to father to, eventually, mom herself.

Narrators Mark Bramhall, Samantha Quan, Janet Song, and Bruce Turk do a beautiful, graceful job inhabiting these characters, bringing to the performance all their feelings of fear, guilt, shame, and regret. The narration holds cohesively as the work of an ensemble. They all come together miraculously well, making the story seem more like a play than a series of intertwined vignettes. The multiple voices also complement the text, written and translated (by Chi-Young Kim) with sparse language and frequent pauses to accentuate the spaces in between the thoughts. Bramhall's performance as the patriarch of the family is particularly moving. His narration is low, remorseful, exhausted, and dejected, as his character is forced to acknowledge that he has mistreated his wife and taken her for granted.

The story touches upon many major themes: loss of tradition, rural flight, the rise of urban culture, the de-emphasis of the importance of family, female endurance, and, most centrally, the role of mothers in society. At its most rational, Please Look After Mom is a critique on a shifting South Korea. At its most emotional, it's an ode to all the unsung good mothers of the world. —Gina Pensiero