A Cab Called Reliable Book Review

A Cab Called Reliable: A Novel by Patti Kim

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


This is a story about a Korean-American girl who moved to America when she was 7 and the issues of identity, culture, and coming of age that she faces. Her mother takes her brother and leaves her with her abusive father when she is 9 and she can't understand why. As she matures she strives to find her place in the world and come to terms with who she is and the hand she's been dealt.

A part of me really wanted to like this story, the writing is good and many of the themes are universal, but I just felt bored reading it. It's a really short book and shouldn't take long at all to read but there's not much excitement, I didn't feel invested in the characters and I didn't really care what happened to them. I felt like I was reading a documentary on a Korean immigrant family. The thing that really did it in for me though was the author telling me flat out the reason why the protagonist's mother left. The main character spends all this time trying to figure out why her mother abandoned her - her entire identity seems to be founded in that question - only to find that there is a simple straightforward reason to why she left. For me this book lost most of its depth and became devoid of further contemplation after that.

Even though I'm being rather critical of it, I did still get some enjoyment from reading it. Like I said, a lot of the themes are easy to relate to and to a certain extent it's interesting to see how this girl and her father develop.

While I wouldn't recommend it to any serious reader, I'm sure younger people, especially girls, could find it enjoyable.



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