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Title: A Step From Heaven
ISBN: 0142500275
Author:
An Na
Publicate Date: 2003-01-13
Publish: 2003-01-13
List Price: $7.99
Average Customer Rating: 4.5
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $2.97
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $1.54
Amazon Merchant Price: $7.99
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1: Great classroom read for Adolescents
An Na writes a wonderful story about a four year old Korean-born girl moves to the United States with her mother and father. Even though, the main character faces many challenges in her young life, including an alcoholic father and physical abuse, she is able to persevere and see many of her dreams and those of her mother come true.
An Na is very deserving of the Michael Printz award as well as the many others this book received.
The reader is able to see Young Ju grow up through the writing style. The beginning of the book is written as the memories of a young child and moves to the thoughts and life events of a young adult. It would open up many conversations about different cultures as well as difficulties that any student may face as a teen in the United States.
An Na is originally from Korea, but she grew up in the United States, specifically, San Diego, California. She was a middle school English and history teacher before becoming a writer. HShe has written Two other novels as well, The Fold and Wait for me.
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2: Definitely a dynamo of a novel
"A Step from Heaven" is An Na's first novel. Published in 2001, the book has received a lot of praise in reviews as well as winning the 2002 Printz Award (for excellence in young adult literature). The reason I like this book (and have added it to my CLW line up) is that the story shows the character's evolution as she works to become a stronger, more empowered individual.
Young Ju lives in Korea in a lovely house near the sea with her parents and her grandmother. Everything changes for Young Ju when Uhmma and Apa start talking about Mi Gook. Apa stops hurting Uhmma and scaring Young Ju and his mother. Mi Gook is a magic word for the Park family. Until Young Ju realizes that Mi Gook doesn't mean heaven like she thought--instead it means moving far away to a strange place called America where nothing is as magical (or easy) as the family had thought it would be.
The novel starts when Young Ju is four, before she knows the word "Mi Gook" and is being introduced to the water and waves. The story ends when Young Ju is about to start college. In between, Na weaves together a series of vignettes to show what life is like for the Parks in America. The story is about the immigrant experience, but even more than that it's about family--very specifically: it's about this family, the Parks.
Stylistically, this novel is a dynamo. Na incorporates Korean words and phrases into the novel from the get go. With a couple of exceptions, she doesn't translate within the text. This does two things: on one hand it makes the novel feel more real in that the narrative (the story is narrated by Young Ju who becomes a more reliable narrator as she gets older) is not interrupted by translations meant to benefit the reader. On the other hand, it gets a little confusing because no translations also means no context for the words. That led to a bit of a stumble when I first started the novel and couldn't decided if Uhmma meant "grandmother" or "mother" (it means "mother" by the way, "Apa" is father and Halmoni means "grandmother). Eventually I had to look up the words online and reread the first couple of pages--but after that it was smooth sailing.
More impressive, and equally effective, is the way that Na subtly alters her prose as Young Ju ages and becomes more familiar with English. The novel is written in the first person, present tense. The beginning of the story told in short, poetic fragments. Even the beginning chapter/vignettes are shorter than those at the end. The sentences get longer (arguably more complex) through the course of the novel.
Na also maintains both Korean and English throughout the novel. Korean appears in phrases throughout and as dialogue without quotations marks. (English dialogue is presented conventionally which makes it easy to note when the characters switch back and forth.)
As the Park family tries to cope with the hardships of American life it becomes clear that their family might not be strong enough to take all of the pressure. By the end of the novel though, after both Young Ju and Uhmma face some dramatic changes, readers leave with the sense that--after so long--the Parks are finally on their way to that elusive American dream.
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3: One Immigrant's Experience
Katherine
03-04-08
Period 2
One Immigrant's Experience
A Step from Heaven by An Na is the winner of the 2002 Michael L. Printz Award, and a 2001 National Book Award Finalist. It is narrated by a Korean immigrant, Young Ju Park. As young child, her family decides to move to "Mi Gook", America. From the stories of her faithful-Christian grandma, Young Ju is convinced to believe that America is heaven. However, soon she finds out that America is far from heaven. As a young child to a high school graduate, Young Ju fights through many obstacles. In school, she encounters through acceptance, struggling to learn English, and making new friends. At home, she must survive through her father's sexism attitude, depression, and alcoholism causing violent behavior, such as, verbal and physical abuse towards her mother. She also feels that her parents only care about her new baby brother, so she fights for attention. Even with all these great problems, Young Ju struggles through still remaining a Korean heritage while trying to fit in as and American girl. Throughout Young Ju's life, she feels like she is "a step from heaven", but not exactly there. As she grows up, she starts to find her identity and starts to speak out. By the end, she is seen as a respectable, admirable, inspiring, young woman. We are able to see her transformation from a young, clueless girl to a girl with great wisdom and courage.
The author, An Na was born in Korea and grew up in San Diego, California. She says she wrote this book to "express some of the longings and frustrations that [she] felt as an immigrant growing up in America", similar to Young Ju. An Na accurately captured the experience if being and immigrant in America. Through this book, An Na powerfully described the immigrant experience. When I first read the blurb, I thought it would be an ordinary book about the struggle with immigrants. However, after I read, I saw that it was not only a good book, but I was extremely touched and had a connection to the book. I felt her pain, her joy, and her shame. I felt like I was reliving Young Ju's childhood. Born into a traditional Korean family and going to a school full of new and unfamiliar faces, I felt like an outcast. It led to a time in my life when I was ashamed of my family and my Korean culture. I fought between being Korean or American. It wasn't until later that I realized I was a Korean American.
The House on Mango Street is similar to A Step from Heaven because they both tell about two young immigrants who struggle through similar issues, such as, poverty, acceptance, making new friends, and choosing between two different cultures. Through their experiences, they are able to find their identity, and shapes who they become when they are older. Both acceptance and prejudice are major themes in these two books, where they must struggle between two cultures. Both authors similarly use vignettes to tell the story and a great amount of imagery to help us visualize, understand, and allow us to feel what Young Ju and Esperanza was feeling. A Step from Heaven is a fast, easy-read that keeps you alert. I think it is a greatly written, memorable book that I would definitely recommend to others.
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4: An Na has the gift!
I am a pre-service teaching student majoring in Secondary Education (English & History). I first noticed the title of this book while reading one of the chapters in Essentials of Young Adult Literature and thought that a book about immigrating to America from Korea could be interesting. I immediately I hoped that I could find a way to use it as part of the required reading during this class (particularly since pleasure-reading is more or less a luxury at this time in my life). When I started reading through the lists of books that we could use for realistic fiction I was disappointed because time and time again, I did not see this novel - but it was there. It continued to call to me and I finally managed to find it.
This novel is a series of vignettes following the life of Young Ju from a period that is just prior to her move to Mi Gook (the US) at the age of four and continuing until she is about to leave home for college. The storyline encapsulates the many aspects of family dynamics but also provides the reader with accurate depictions of going to the INS (now USCIS) to renew a green card to interactions between members of her church congregation to Young Ju's experiences of hearing English for the first time.
There are so many things that make this novel unique that it is hard to capture them all. The first thing I noticed was a lack of quotation marks when various characters of the novel were speaking to one another. I was confused because I could not figure out why this convention had been implemented. I wondered if the Korean language lacked quotation marks, if the printer had chosen not to use them, if the author was making some sort of statement, or if it was some bizarre print error. Amazingly, those very marks popped up later in the novel (and I didn't even notice them at first). I soon realized the answer: quotation marks were only used when English was spoken which leads me to believe they are not used in Korean writing. The author's use of Korean words throughout the text without providing the definitions of those words really intrigued me. This required me, as a reader, to learn them through repetitive use by the author - just as Young Ju would have learned English. This convention further immersed me into the world of Young Ju and her family members. An Na has an amazing ability to capture Young Ju's unique vision of the world as a child who is encountering new things for the first time (a fat ball of snowy paper stuck on the wall = toilet paper). Even more impressive is the maturation of Young Ju's voice from a four year old through her teenage years.
It is quite easy to see why An Na won the Printz Award for her first novel.
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5: Unusual prose, familiar story
A young adult autobiographical novel of one family's late-20th-century emigration to America, living in poverty. Told in prose so abbreviated as to be annoying, first person, present tense, with odd transliterations. Some find this language treatment intriguing, revealing, mirroring and poetic, but I found it contrived, overly clever and precocious. Na's perceptions and details are vivid, but added few deep personal insights into the familiar story of divided culture and backbreaking work by parents, who are mean, demanding and unforgiving of change. However, I'm an adult reader, jaded by extensive reading of Asian American writings, and young adults may find this book revelatory.
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