From the bestselling author of All You Can Ever Know comes a searing memoir of class, inequality, and griefâa daughterâs search to understand the lives her adoptive parents led, the life she forged as an adult, and the lives sheâs lost.
In this country, unless you attain extraordinary wealth, you will likely be unable to help your loved ones in all the ways youâd once hoped. You will learn to live with the specific, hollow guilt of those who leave hardship behind, yet are unable to bring anyone else with them.
When Nicole Chung graduated from high school, she couldnât hightail it out of her overwhelmingly white Oregon hometown fast enough. As a scholarship student at a private university on the East Coast and no longer the only Korean she knew, she found a sense of community she had always craved as an Asian American adopteeâand a path to the life sheâd long wanted.
But the middle-class world she begins to raise a family inâwhere there are big homes and college fundsâlooks very different from the middle-class world she thought she grew up in, where paychecks have to stretch to the end of the week and there are no safety nets. When her father dies at only sixty-seven, killed by the kidney disease that took the life of his mother before him, Nicole feels deep grief as well as rage, knowing that years of financial instability and lack of access to health care contributed to his premature death. And then the unthinkable happensâless than a year later, her beloved mother is diagnosed with cancer, and the physical distance between them becomes insurmountable as COVID descends upon the world.
Exploring the enduring strength of family bonds in the face of hardship and tragedy, A Living Remedy examines what it takes to reconcile the distance between one life, one home, and anotherâand sheds needed light on some of the most persistent and tragic inequalities in American society.
For the more advanced high school reader who is ready for adult reading and enjoys nonfiction, our ACN Category is a great choice. With more sophisticated and challenging themes, these books open up new worlds for teen readers. Help them experience a new world monthly with the 14 books in ACN.
Take note: These selections often contain mature situations and language that could be considered controversial.
14 books per Year
$309.26 per Year
Interests
Diversity, Mature Readers, LGBTQ+, Nonfiction, Biographies, History