LIAR, DREAMER, THIEF

In Dong’s vertiginous debut, a mentally unstable woman stumbles across a conspiracy.

After Katrina Kim flunks out of college, she returns to her family’s home in Pleasance Village, Illinois, seeking solace; her father sends her away, however, suggesting Katrina stay at a hotel or a friend’s house. Katrina goes to the local library and parks, curling up in her car’s back seat while her mind retreats into Mi-Hee and the Mirror-Man, her favorite Korean children’s book. Like Katrina, Mi-Hee is a lonely girl with compulsive tendencies, but Mi-Hee can access a fantasy world via her kitchen door and has a truth-revealing spyglass. Determined to create her own new existence, Katrina drives to Grand Station, gets an office job, and moves in with a stranger who saw her plea for help on Craigslist and took pity. The stress proves too much, and Katrina starts dissociating, layering Mi-Hee’s “kitchen-door world over [her] own, like a colored pane of glass.” She develops elaborate protection rituals and starts following co-worker Kurt Smith because she thinks they’re connected. Then, one night on the Cayatoga Bridge, Katrina sees Kurt crash his SUV. He extricates himself, screams at Katrina for ruining things, and jumps off the railing. Katrina tells the police, who dismiss her, but when Kurt misses work on Monday, Katrina launches her own investigation, uncovering a reality far stranger than her inner fictions. Events unfold courtesy of Katrina’s anxious, unmoored first-person present narration, keeping readers off-kilter. Some characters lack depth and verisimilitude, but Katrina’s fraught relationship with her immigrant parents rings true. Though the setup drags on, sapping the book's momentum, once the mystery drops into gear, increasingly bonkers twists propel the story to a cogent, poignant close.

A rabbit hole worth falling down.