This book was an interesting story of a daughter learning about her mother's unknown life after her death. The story was compelling enough for me to continue reading till the end but it was for sure a slow burn of a so-called page turner. Overall, I would recommend for people who are interested in Korean history and the immigrant experience in America.

This book started our strong! With the author starting the book with the death of the character, we are taken back and forth with both characters to piece together what happened. I initially was drawn to this book because of the heavily suggested mother-daughter theme and I also love books that feature Korean characters, I just felt like the book wavered and just ended up being flat overall.

<b>What worked:</b>
I liked that the author has the two POVs we got a layered look into Mina and Margot’s relationship. I felt for Margot and her grief, she is grieving the mother she knows and the mother she did not know- that for me was profound.
I loved how the author wrote about immigration and what it is like for persons who do not have papers. It is such a struggle to start over and I loved that the author was realistic in how the theme was presented.
I think having the end at the beginning did a lot to keep me going to the end.

<B> What didn’t work </b>
The writing started off strong but, in the end,, it really faltered and the book dragged. While I am generally fine with having loose ends or unanswered questions, I felt a lot of things were not explored. We didn’t get a solid picture of Mina BEFORE America, I wanted to hear more about that. I also felt like the author dragged the ending of the book, 60% in and I wanted it to be wrapped up.

Overall, this book really fell flat.

Mina Lee's story is a sad, heart-wrenching portrayal of how difficult an American immigrant's life -- especially as an illegal -- can be. While you often hear the "American Dream" success stories of those who forge a meaningful life, this tale is probably closer to the truth for most foreigners.
Hard-working, beaten-down Mina struggles through a joyless life trying to feel as little as possible, and often wonders if she should just quietly end it all. When her daughter, Margot, finds Mina dead, Margot tries to piece together the many parts of her mother's life that she never knew and/or never understood.
I appreciated the succinct and vulnerable portrayal of poor American immigrant life, and the poignant rendering of two disparate generations/cultures trying to connect (the mother/daughter dynamic). Some of the writing was quite lyrical. However, the repetitive sections (including clarifying descriptions), awkward turns of phrase, and murky wording punctured my engagement:

Mina Lee has many stories but none to share with Margot, her daughter. Margot has only sad stories to reveal because she is embarrassed by her Korean identity, her poverty, and her immigrant mother. Escaping to Seattle and feeling guilty for not having kept in close touch with her mother, she plans to make a visit to L.A. with her friend. Instead of a reunion, she finds Mina dead on the floor of her apartment. From a landlord’s remark she decides her mother was murdered. Finding an obituary of a stranger among her mother’s papers, she seeks answers from the few people who knew Mina. The deeper she probes, the more complex her mother’s life seems. As Margot pieces together the fragmented information, the reader follows Mina herself through a secondary storyline. Nancy Jooyoun Kim offers an opportunity to share in the life of “Koreatown” and its citizens. Following the stories of Mina and Margot, we see the importance of family and the value of trusted friends.

This one fell flat for me, although I did enjoy reading parts of Mina's perspective. It included an anit-American rant about 25% of the way in and I found this irritating and I'm not even an American. Overall, it just didn't hold my interest, Thank you publisher and NetGalley for the ARC.

There’s a special kind of pain in my heart reserved for knowing how a story ends, even as it's unfolding.

Like this: In 1987, we chart forty-one-year-old Mina Lee’s journey to the US. She begins stocking shelves and carrying produce at a Koreatown supermarket, navigating Los Angeles's smoggy streets, seeking snippets of beauty in its heat, poverty, and intersecting cultures. She forges friendships with other undocumented immigrants, and finds herself falling for a kind man who ultimately leaves her behind.

All the while, we already know how her story ends. 2014: Mina, dead in her apartment, alone; it is days before her daughter Margot even realizes. Weeks since they last spoke. A year since they were in each other’s company. And many, many years since they were able to bridge that divide particular to immigrant families: that of lost language, assimilation, shame, and inherited traumas. Incommunicable love.

◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️◻️

The Last Story of Mina Lee is a book that will make your heart ache. It's written in gorgeous prose and captures the intense, complex grief of two women—a mother and daughter—who struggle to carve out their own stories in a space permeated by whiteness and dictated by men.

I really, really liked this one, y'all. This book wasn't perfect (I didn't care for the mystery/thriller aspects surrounding Mina's death, the resolution was a touch harried, and sometimes the metaphors felt overwrought) but I'm SO incredibly moved by Mina's story.

She is a war orphan, a woman mourning the husband and child who died in Seoul, a middle-aged undocumented immigrant in Los Angeles. She is a single mother with a broken heart. She is all these things and more.

Yet Margot, who doesn't speak Korean and resents all her mother represents—poverty, alienness, a lack of agency—will never know these things: her mother is dead now, and there's no one left to tell her these stories.

Neither Margot nor her mother fully grasp the extent of the other's lives. It's only the reader, accessing both POVs, who realizes how little each woman understood the other—but how much they loved each other, too. This disconnect was DEVASTATING for me.

Lastly, I want to mention that this book captures some really beautiful moments of solidarity between people of colour. A Sikh cabbie tells Mina to keep her fare on her very first day in LA. Mina learns Spanish to joke and speak with her Latinx coworkers. She and her lover help an undocumented Mexican family find work, and escape an abusive employer. In a book filled with moments that will absolutely wreck you, these were some of the most moving.

The story of Mina Lee, a Korean immigrant and her daughter Margot. The story switches views between Mina Lee experiences as she strives for the American Dream and her daughter, a Korean American who doesn’t connect with her mother.
Mina’s story is captivating and beautifully developed, unlike Margots story. I wanted more from her and had a hard time connecting to her story.
The Last Story of Mina Lee is still worth the read. It opens your eyes to an Own Voices immigrant story filled with hope and heartache.

While a little slow to start, this book is profoundly moving. This story speaks volumes of an immigrant struggling to survive and an Asian American grappling for acceptance, and also depicts a difficult mother-daughter relationship. Mina Lee is an immigrant from Korea who doesn't speak English while her daughter Margot is ashamed of her mom and the poor conditions she grew up in. Of course, Margot cannot really speak Korean and is frustrated that her mom does not seem to want to assimilate into American life.

But Mina's story is exactly what we need. You get a real glimpse into the life of an immigrant, and it is not an easy one. It is an incredibly difficult thing to be an immigrant in America, and not many understand this. Throughout the book, you learn with Margot about her mother's life, and you begin to understand just what it means to be "different". I have long admired the courage that each immigrant who comes to the US has, and this book only strengthened my admiration. I was a little disheartened to not learn much about Miguel, Margot's best friend. But overall, this was a very interesting read that had me glued to the pages.

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5/5 Stars - A brilliant family saga about love and loss.

Pre-book warning - I can guarantee that after reading this book, you will be picking up the phone to order takeout from your local Korean restaurant! Prepare in advance, lol.

This book has a bit of a mystery interwoven amidst a moving story about a daughter who discovers who mother’s story’s she struggles to deal with her death. But it is mostly a very touching family drama about a woman (Mina) who wanted to find a place to belong and her daughter who pushed her away (Margot).

I loved both of the characters in the book and really felt for them both as they dealt with a lot of issues that many people deal with - loneliness, the need to belong, love - all while dealing with the struggles of doing all of that while straddling two cultures. I really enjoyed reading about both Korean culture and the immigration experience in general, like the urge to both reinvent yourself as well as seek the familiar. It was really eye-opening.

The main story was also really well crafted as it flowed between the two timelines. I also did not see the ending coming, though I really loved it. I thought it had exactly the right tone and it was really satisfying after learning the truth of what happened.

I definitely wouldn’t mind seeing more from these characters, perhaps as Margot has a daughter of her own, and/or continues what was happening at the very end, though I can’t say much more.

Overall, this was a great book that I sped through as I was eager to find out what happened to these well-drawn characters. None looking for a moving, emotional story with a touch of mystery should pick this one up.

This book just didn't have the fast start I think it needed and it took me a long time to get into but it was a good story overall.

Loved the alternating perspectives between a daughter in the present and her mother in the past. Margot is a 26-year old admin assistant in Seattle who is embarrassed of her Korean mother who doesn’t speak English and growing up poor with a single mom. Of course she didn’t know half of her mom’s story until after her death, when she realized that maybe she should have learned Korean and spent more time with her mom. Mina Lee is the mom, and the things she has endured in her life are simply unfathomable to most people. She makes you think about how much immigrants suffer and nobody knows the half of it. More than that, they aren’t even respected, and we see exactly why Mina Lee had no interest in learning English.

I never figured out how Margot was raised by a single mom who only spoke Korean and grew up not able to speak the language. Margot had a best friend, Miguel, whose move promoted Margot’s trip to L.A. to find her mother. I was saddened that we never learned much of anything about him- he was really a non-character. Other than that it was an interesting read and kept me guessing to the end.

Mother-daughter relationships can be tricky under the best of circumstances. Add in an immigrated Korean mother with a past she refuses to discuss, a daughter who wants to be American and refuses to learn Korean, an unknown father and a language barrier between mother and daughter and you have a recipe for a lifetime of hurt and questions. Alternating chapters take us through the lives of Mina Lee and her now grown daughter, Margo. Mina wants to protect the only family she now has and Margo feels smothered and frustrated with this woman who does nothing but work and refuses to ever have fun. Author Kim draws us into the lives of these two women and makes us see that each is trying to fill a void in their current and past relationships. It is only after Margo starts unearthing information about her mother's past that she can finally understand her mother's actions. Chapters read smoothly and seamlessly blend from mother to daughter's life stories, allowing readers to see the commonalities in their lives which the characters cannot see for themselves. Recommended.

A suspenseful book about a Mother, daughter relationship . After the mother dies the daughter looks into her past and finds out many secrets her mother kept from her. Finding these secrets out helped her daughter to heal and move on and make a life for herself.

I’m sure a lot of readers will like this book because it had a few unexpected twists, but I just couldn’t get past the depressing mood of the mother and daughter. The plight of immigrants is bleak for alot of them, This book deals with that, too, but I just didn’t want to continue reading that. So that is why I only give it three stars.

Once I got past the first few chapters I became invested in the storyline about Mina, but never did with the Margot storyline. Her personality never felt developed to me and I started to skim her chapters and eventually skipped them all together. Throughout the book the descriptions seem forced and I struggled to understand the character's relationships to each other and their motivations.
I wish the mother/daughter relationship was more fully developed, maybe I would have felt more invested in finding Margot's father if it was.
I am not a mystery fan, so maybe that's why I wasn't interested in Margot's story, but I was really hoping to get invested in Mina's immigration story and her friendship with Mrs Baek and romance with Mr Kim. It never really happened for me. The middle of the book dragged for me and I found myself skimming to the very abrupt changes at the end.
I wish I could explain more eloquently why I didn't love this book but honestly it just didn't do it for me.
#TheLastStoryofMinaLee #NetGalley

I received an ARC of this novel from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Margot finds her mother and then searches for answers about her secretive mother's life. She comes to understand how difficult her mother's life was and finds the courage to make changes in her own life.

She left her country after a devastating loss, and goes to America. This is her story and the story of her daughter who comes to understand her mother after she is gone.

This was different from what I usually read and I can't quite describe it. I liked the story, Here's a 26 year old Margot who can't get in touch with her monther Mina. She finally tries to find her and is shocked to discover that her mother died. As with such situations Margot dives into her mother's past to find out more about her and to maybe understand her better. The relationship between Margot and her mother was conflicted and strained which seems to be a common theme lately. But I love the back story to Mina and what led her to make the choices she made. The characters in this book are strong and I'm recommending this to my book club

Thank you so much to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

3.75/5 stars

I don't remember ever being this much on a fence about a book. I loved so many things about it, but somehow it also fell just a tad short for me.

Let's start with the good things! I l LOVED her writing, lyrical, smart and nuanced, but still to the point. I absolutely adored all of her views on immigration and how it feels to be one, "American dream" and growing up having your world split in two. I related immensely, I am an immigrant myself - so I highlighted A LOT in this book. Straight to the heart.

This would have been a perfect read, but the plot was very questionable, and dialog felt very forced, which was the biggest bummer as it disabled me from really connecting to the characters.

​I still recommend it though, this book has TOO MUCH wisdom to pass it on. It opens the eyes of those who aren't immigrants, and it completely obliterates the hearts of those who have wore the shoes of immigration themselves. I loved getting destroyed by the feelings this book gave me. Own Voices immigration stories are my ABSOLUTE favorites.

Big thanks to NEtGalley and HARLEQUIN – Trade Publishing (U.S. & Canada) for a digital advanced reader copy of this book. Opinions are my own.