Miracle Creek by Angie Kim

Miracle Creek by Angie Kim – 357 pages

Book Blurb:

In the small town of Miracle Creek, Virginia, Young and Pak Yoo run an experimental medical treatment device known as the Miracle Submarine—a pressurized oxygen chamber that patients enter for therapeutic “dives” with the hopes of curing issues like autism or infertility. But when the Miracle Submarine mysteriously explodes, killing two people, a dramatic murder trial upends the Yoos’ small community. Who or what caused the explosion? Was it the mother of one of the patients, who claimed to be sick that day but was smoking down by the creek? Or was it Young and Pak themselves, hoping to cash in on a big insurance payment and send their daughter to college? The ensuing trial uncovers unimaginable secrets from that night—trysts in the woods, mysterious notes, child-abuse charges—as well as tense rivalries and alliances among a group of people driven to extraordinary degrees of desperation and sacrifice.

My Review: 4.5 stars

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Miracle Creek will probably be one of the best debuts of 2019. Angie Kim has delivered a tension filled mystery and a courtroom drama, while exploring the Korean immigrant experience.

This book started with a bang and finished with a boom. From the first few sentences the reader will be hooked. In a first-person point of view, the book starts with, “My husband asked me to lie.” Are you kidding me? I’m already invested in the why behind that sentence. We all know that if there’s one lie, there are certain to be more lies. With several characters telling their POVs, the reader is uncertain who to believe and will try to ascertain nuggets of truth from each character.

As big as the mystery is, it’s the Miracle Submarine that incites the drama. This is a pressurized oxygen system known to cure different illnesses. All the characters that have been in the submarine, the protesters near the submarine and the family that runs the chamber are all suspects in its explosion.

With so much going on, the author deftly weaves in thought-provoking issues such as how much is too much to make your child ‘normal’, eastern versus western medicine, parenting special needs children, immigrants adapting to society, the value of friendship and the quickness in which a lie can take on a life of its own. 

This is one you won’t want to miss.

Quotes I liked:

Tragedies don’t inoculate you against further tragedies, and misfortune doesn’t get sprinkled out in fair proportions; bad things get hurled at you in clumps and batches, unmanageable and messy.”

In a way, he supposed, it was inevitable for immigrants to become child versions of themselves, stripped of their verbal fluency and, with it, a layer of their competence and maturity.” 

“To Americans, verbiage was an inherent good, akin to kindness or courage. They loved words—the more, the longer, and more quickly said, the smarter and more impressive.” 

“But that was the way life worked. Every human being was the result of a million different factors mixing together — one of a million sperm arriving at the egg at exactly a certain time; even a millisecond off, and another entirely different person would result. Good things and bad–every friendship and romance formed, every accident, every illness–resulted from the conspiracy of hundreds of little things, in and of themselves inconsequential.”