Please Look After Mom

By: Kyung-Sook Shin, Chi-Young Kim - translator

Narrated by: Mark Bramhall, Samantha Quan, Janet Song, Bruce Turk

Length: 7 hrs and 57 mins

Publisher's summary

A million-plus-copy best seller in Korea - a magnificent English-language debut poised to become an international sensation - this is the stunning, deeply moving story of a family’s search for their mother, who goes missing one afternoon amid the crowds of the Seoul Station subway.

Told through the piercing voices and urgent perspectives of a daughter, son, husband, and mother, Please Look After Mom is at once an authentic picture of contemporary life in Korea and a universal story of family love.

You will never think of your mother the same way again after you listen to this book.

©2011 Kyung-Sook Shin (P)2011 Random House

A tear jerker.

At first it was difficult to get into but after the 3rd chapter I could not stop listening to it. Beware, you may need tissue throughout the story.

A must for everyone!

So important to everyone but you do not know it yet. I spent one day non stop. Amazing...

Love this book

This is the most amazing reading I have done in a long time. To have most of the family's viewpoint on their mother and each other is truly a wonderful insight in family dynamics. Donna Martinsen, Petersburg, Alaska

Good read

What made the experience of listening to Please Look After Mom the most enjoyable?

Downloaded to my ipod. Enjoyed the story and it was easy to follow the readers.

Why was this book written?

It seems that the book, with its intense overuse of the WORD "mom" , is a long and disconnected confession of unresolved issues between children and parents

Not very uplifting

I would not recommend this book unless you enjoy reading about guilt and suffering.
The one redeeming value to the book is that it highlights how we can all find gratitude in small things everyday.

Lost in translation

Maybe it’s unfair to criticize the translation as it may very well be a good and faithful one. But unfortunately, everything about the story that made it Korean has been lost. If this had been a story written in English about a Korean family, I think the author would have written it in a style that would have tried to capture the sense of place, maybe preserving some of the Korean language (using “umma” for mom or all the other titles for family members that exist in the Korean language for instance), giving us details that would capture the look and feel of homes and faces, the smells of a Korean kitchen, etc ... Instead, a stinky, bubbling stew loved by millions of people is referred to as a bean paste Zucchini soup. It could’ve been a story about any North American family for all this translation did to place us into this world that should be foreign to English readers but felt so banal in this English translation.

Terribly Boring

I still don’t know if they found her missing mother. Also, the four different people doing the audible was terrible.

Couldn't finish the audiobook

This was the first time I was unable to sit through the reading of an audiobook. I found myself mentally correcting the "tense" used in this book. Not sure if it was suppose to be in the 3rd person, the reference to "you" instead of "I" threw me for a loop and make it difficult to concentrate on the story line.

Not much story

The narrators do a good job reading the story and I really like that there is a different narrator for each character. The style of this story takes time to get used to and the story is not about a family searching for their lost mother/wife but is instead a narration of how each character remembers the lost woman and everything she has done for them. This story is also slightly different from the original South Korean version, I would like to know which parts were changes.