Wait for Me

by An Na Narrated by Kim Mai Guest

Overview

Mina is the perfect daughter. Bound for Harvard, president of the honor society, straight A student, all while she works at her family's dry cleaners and helps care for her hearing-impaired younger sister. On the outside, Mina does everything right. On the inside, Mina knows the truth. Her life is a lie.
At the height of a heat wave, the summer before her senior year, Mina meets the one person to whom she cannot lie. Ysrale, a young migrant worker who dreams of becoming a musician, comes to work at the dry cleaners and asks Mina the one question that scares her most. What does she want?
Mina finds herself torn between living her mother's dreams, caring for her younger sister, grasping the love that Ysrael offers, and the most difficult of all, living a life that is true.
With sensitivity and grace, An Na weaves an intriguing story of a young woman caught in the threads of secrets and lies, struggling for love and finding a voice of her own.

Editorial Reviews

Harvard bound, Honor Society president, straight-A student: Mina is the picture perfect daughter. Beneath all the superlatives, though, is an insecure teenager groping for her real identity. Told through the words of its Korean-American protagonist, An Na's Wait for Me captures the intensity of adolescent experience without false dramatization or sentimentality.

Kirkus Reviews

What defines success? For one immigrant Korean mother, it is nothing less than a Harvard education. Seventeen-year-old Mina has created a high-school life filled with the illusion of straight A's and a topnotch college preparatory program in order to meet the overwhelming demands and expectations of her controlling Uhmma. Aided by former boyfriend and fellow Korean Jonathan, Mina adds some cheating to her life of lying. Her younger, hearing-impaired sister Suna, viewed as "damaged" by Uhmma, and the forbidden love and realistic advice of new, Mexican boyfriend Ysrael, ultimately force a sense of accountability in Mina. In an open-ended and arresting conclusion, she begins to face the truth within herself. Once again Na has created a compelling drama riveted with emotional anguish. She draws her characters completely from within their souls, expressing the dreaded fear and doubt of protagonist Mina, which is brought on by the harshness and overbearing parental presumptions of Uhmma, and complicated by the loving responsibility for neglected and virtually abandoned sister, Suna. For Mina, success will depend on how she confronts her own desires, voices them to her rigid, insufferable mother and begins to live an honest life for herself. Gripping and engrossing. (Fiction. YA)

From the Publisher

She draws her characters completely from within their souls. . . .Gripping and engrossing. (Kirkus Reviews, starred review)

Product Details

BN ID:	2940172223891
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	06/13/2006
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

prologue

She walks alone in the rain. The faded pink pajama bottoms and oversized T-shirt clinging to her small frame, heavy with the weight of water. Her breath breaks inside her chest in an upward heave that strangles a cry escaping from her throat. Gulps of air. Her shoulders rising and falling. How much time has passed? She presses the heel of her hand against the tears that blur her vision. Though her chest still throbs, demanding air, she begins to run again. Looks down at her feet and urges them to fly faster, skim across the pavement.

The city, a dusty camouflage of grays punctuated with dots of colors from traffic lights and swirling neon signs, stretches awake in the early-morning drizzle. In the distance there is the slam of metal gates being pushed aside, revealing cluttered storefronts and display windows. The heartbeat of the city thickens with the heat of summer rising as steam from the streets, with the noise of cars speeding across the freeway, with the multitude of voices and languages rising up to greet each other. The day begins, yet all Suna can see is the memory of a face framed by night. A face so familiar, so loved, she can name each imperfection, each mark as though they are her own.

Suna runs forward without a glance, without a thought. To the car rounding the curve of the freeway off-ramp. The road slick with oil and rain. She pumps her arms and wills herself into the light.

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