Everything Asian, by Sung J. Woo (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2009; ISBN-13 978-0-312-53885-9)

This novel-in-stories centers around the Kim family, particularly 12-year-old David Dae Joon Kim, who has just come from South Korea with his mother and 16-year-old sister to join his father in the United States. Mr. Kim runs a store called "East Meets West" at a shabby New Jersey mall called Peddlers Town.

Stories from different perspectives show many facets of the Kim family and their world; although David's is the central point of view, other narrators include his sister, a private detective who's opened an office in Peddlers Town, the Kims' friends and fellow Korean emigres the Hong family, and others who are part of the mundane yet richly imagined world Woo evokes for his characters.

Woo's novel-in-stories shouldn't be seen as just part of a trend--the form is hot right now, to be sure, especially since Isabelle Strout's Olive Kittredge won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Like all the best books in this form, Everything Asian uses the multiple points of view to depict the complexities of human interaction. Woo's writing is strong, and his characters are richly and vividly imagined.

One of the triumphs of the book is its delicate balance between depicting the specific cultural challenges of lower-middle-class Korean immigrants (English-language classes, the Kim children's first attempts to cook a spaghetti dinner for their parents) and the family dramas experienced by so many adolescents in every culture (David's difficulties in relating to his father, his sister's rebellion against their parents' expectations).