award-winning and bestselling YA novelist Chris Crutcher
Hurt You is a big, brave story of ‘otherness’ juxtaposed with ‘extreme otherness,’ and friendship under fire. The issues, in their sheer number and intensity, could have been taken over the top by a less accomplished storyteller, but Marie Myung-Ok Lee’s protagonist, Georgia Kim, tells it seamlessly. If you’re not swept away by Georgia’s tough and completely honest loyalty, read the book again.”
multiple-award-winning author of David Tung Can Ed Lin
Marie Myung-Ok Lee wonderfully recasts Of Mice and Men for a new America. Lee is a brave and insightful storyteller, and her words of pain—and hope—seep into our souls.”
LA Review of Books
Hurt You smartly updates Steinbeck’s classic for a young adult readership, foregrounding issues of class, cultural identity, disability, and gun violence. Each of Lee’s beautifully complex characters reveals a potential not captured by the labels that overtake them in young adulthood…I find Hurt You profoundly relevant right now.”
award-winning author of Re Jane and Imposter Syndr Patricia Park
I learned so much from these pages. Marie Myung-Ok Lee’s timely and critical work recasts Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men as Korean American siblings and pushes much-needed conversations on neurodiversity, racism, and what families—and communities—owe to each other.”
award-winning author of The Serpent King and In th Jeff Zentner
Hurt You reads like something written by a master’s hand, a powerful and heartbreaking story that resonates with the force of love and legend.”
Kirkus Reviews
2023-03-14
A Korean American teen recounts the events leading up to the shooting of her brother.
A newspaper reports that a high school student shot a mentally ill man in self-defense; the victim is Leo, Georgia Kim’s beloved older brother. But as Georgia’s flashback narrative reveals, there’s more to the story…and to Leo, whose developmental disability causes seizures, minimal speech, and violent meltdowns. To meet Leo’s educational needs, the Kims have moved from a diverse city to the suburb of Sunnyvale, California. Georgia, already self-conscious about being fat, is thrust into heavily White Cambridge Academy. Additionally, Georgia struggles to reconcile her devotion to Leo’s care with her radiologist father’s high academic expectations, her mother’s desire that Georgia live her own life, and her own college dreams. Soon, however, Georgia befriends a group comprising Korean Americans and Cambridge’s sole Black student—and falls for two different guys. Her new friends even welcome Leo to hagwon, their Korean study hangout. But everything shatters when a somewhat two-dimensionally villainous classmate misunderstands Leo’s behavior. Georgia’s efforts to respect Leo’s thoughts and feelings are heartening. Because her identity is inextricably entwined with being his sister and protector, her character arc is also closely tied to Leo. This contemporary take on Of Mice and Men tackles numerous heavy issues, including racism, ableism, gun control, and the challenges of caring for a significantly disabled family member, but offers no easy answers.
Devastating. (Fiction. 13-18)
