When My Sister Was Cleopatra Moon

Rating:
Summary: Buy the book
Review: "When My Sister Was Cleopatra Moon" is compelling read.

Rating:
Summary: tapestries of worlds
Review: Frances Park has created an absolutely mesmerizing character in the form of Cleopatra Moon. A young woman with the power to captivate all males who cross her path, expressed in terms which are both poetic and sensually unique to Ms. Park's writing style. As the novel progresses we are provided with clues which indicate that turbulent and unexpectedly vulnerable inner worlds exist within Cleopatra and her initially adoring younger sister. The story twists and shatters stereotypical expectations with the richness of the characters. Yet in the background we see gradually emerge a loving portrait of an often absent father who becomes a multi-layered symbol for redemption and the re-integration of portions of the soul which the two sisters have misplaced over the years.

The two sisters are very much the product of the American 1970's, yet Ms. Park is also able to masterfully convey the Korean-American experience through the character of the mother and her relationship to the two daughters.

Cleopatra is so charismatic that the reader would initially be willing to fall under her spell for the entire length of the novel. Read Chapter Two as a separate work of art in this regard. Yet Frances Park has done far more than create a host of intriguing characters. She has created situations in which initial suspicions yield to deeper meanings over sometimes traumatic and sometimes wryly humorous flows of time. The reader will reflect upon the nature of his or her own relationships and the continuing impact of unresolved emotions of the past. This is a book to be read several times over.

Rating:
Summary: In a Way this is a Story about Karma
Review: Marcy Moon is the youngest daughter of Korean parents and she and her older sister have taken on American values, a fact which distances them from their parents, especially their mother.

Marcy is thrilled the summer her sister returns home from college, renaming herself "Cleopatra Moon." While Cleo uses mascara, dresses provocatively, and runs around with hippy boys, Marcy slowly begins to see through the cracks in her sister's persona. However, she is caught between a good girl image of herself and the bad girl who wants to be like Cleopatra. The promise of a summer filled with possibility fades when their father dies and Marcy is plagued with guilt.

Move years to the future, Cleo's husband dies and Marcy travels from her desert home in Nevada to the funeral in San Francisco, and stays to mind Cleo's two children, one a teenage boy whose distance from his mother grows each day, and she finds herself wanting to take them away from Cleo and to her desert home, because she thinks Cleo doesn't care for them. But she's wrong.

This five star story is fast and funny, but I cried too. It's a wonderful book about sisters and a clash of cultures.

Review submitted by Captain Katie Osborne