The Loom Tree - by Angela Mi Young Hur (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Ninth House meets Babel for fans of myth and folklore in this contemporary fantasy about a Korean-American college student at a magical university where fairy tales intersect with family heritage to unleash powers beyond imagining.

"You always wanted magic to be real."

Sharon and her daughter V's points of origin hold common threads: both Korean American teenagers, raised by a single mother, each searching for her identity in the California suburbs. But during finals week, high schooler V experiences strange impulses during a last-day celebration with her friends and ends up crawling into the hollow trunk of an immense tree. That night, after breaking into a raging fever, V sees gleaming strands of illegible text hovering over her body: a script that flows between her and her mother, leading to Sharon's long-forgotten diary.

With the aid of a luminous quill, a fountainhead of Sharon's uncontrollable memories spill onto the old diary pages. Unexpectedly, V witnesses Sharon as she maps out her time at college in the form of lost histories, diagrams, and drawings.

Young Sharon once accepted a backhanded invitation to Alvsdahl, an exclusive East Coast college as storied and white as Camelot. Here legacies and heiresses claimed descent from Bluebeard or Cinderella, grappling for control over narratives that could grant them terrifying abilities or burn them to ash. An Asian girl with an unknown inheritance was no one--until Sharon's discoveries began to crack open Alvsdahl's secrets.

Her bewitching narrative of classroom rivalries and animal professors, debauchery in the woods and sleeping princesses, threatening Godmothers and world-shattering powers, unfold as V desperately tries to help her mother--only to see how Sharon's story is destined to transform them both.

Lyrically written and highly imaginative, Angela Mi Young Hur's The Loom Tree is a magical campus novel centering on two young women walking the thorny path toward adulthood, the fractures between parents and their children, and the global mythologies and family sagas that connect us all together.

Review Quotes

Praise for Folklorn by Angela Mi Young Hur

"Ghost story, family saga, parable, feminist reimagined myth: Angela Mi Young Hur's hugely ambitious Folklorn is a spellbinding shape-shifter of a novel that tackles questions of race, culture, and history head-on, exploring the blurry boundaries between past and present, fact and fantasy, and personal and cultural--or cosmic." --Celeste Ng, New York Times bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere

"Dark, difficult, and riveting--Folklorn gave me endless trouble, and I appreciate it." --R. F. Kuang, bestselling author of The Poppy War series

"An elegant punch to the face . . . beautiful and hard and hungry, full of sharp, painful observations, slicing clichés open like prickly pears and devouring their hearts." --The New York Times Book Review

"Vivid and delectable. Angela Hur is equally at home working in the fertile territories of myth and the fantastic as in the nuanced portrayal of a contemporary, complex family. I loved this." --Kelly Link, Pulitzer Prize finalist and bestselling author of Get in Trouble

"A gorgeous journey into the intersection of science and myth and how our past traumas shape us--but how they need not define us." --NPR, Best Books of the Year

"A work of capacious, original imagination: part supernatural mystery, part immigrant family story. Hur's mixing and melding of genres is an inventive, elegant means of illuminating the dualities of diasporic experience, as well as a testament to the essential role of stories in understanding our identities." --Peter Ho Davies, author of A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself

"Folklorn is a spectacular book. Hur writes with virtuosity and power, weaving together the ribbons of the mythic with the complex tapestry of family and history to create a gorgeous, moving whole." --Kat Howard, Alex Award-winning author of An Unkindness of Magicians

"In Folklorn, Angela Mi Young Hur weaves the fantastic into the realism of a compelling family saga, creating a heartfelt novel as original as it is irresistible. Pick this up if you're ready to not put it down." --Mat Johnson, author of Loving Day

"A beautiful, liminal exploration of the world, physics, and complex families born and found, told with an added rush of the fantastic." --Fran Wilde, Nebula Award-winning author of Updraft and Riverland

"With enviable ambition and swagger, Folklorn tosses us from one shimmering setting to another: Antarctic research station, Korean spa, Scandinavian island, hipster neighborhood in Stockholm, auto body shop in Southern California. Exploring our genetic and traumatic inheritances, Angela Hur weaves gorgeous Korean fables through a woman's messy, international search for redemption and connection. This novel is brash, defiant and ultimately full of yearning." --Chia-Chia Lin, author of The Unpassing

"Folklorn is extremely ambitious in scope, and the writing never fails to deliver. . . . Angela Mi Young Hur engagingly blends Korean folktales with literary traditions for a fresh take on both the universal story of identity and assimilation, and the national tale of han." --Washington Independent Review of Books

"A complex meditation on intergenerational trauma. . . . The honest look at prickly Elsa's internalized racism is ambitious but often brutal in its unflinching execution. . . . This thought-provoking work will appeal to SFF fans who like their talk of particle physics side by side with fox spirits and fairy tales." --Publishers Weekly

"[Elsa's] story is gripping and rings as true as the bell she hears in her mind. A quiet but compelling rumination on family, race, and trauma, built on the spaces in Korean folktales." --Kirkus Reviews

"Haunting and spiritual and touching, and so unique. This is absolutely one to be cherished." --Tor.com, "30 Most Anticipated Books of 2021"

About the Author

Angela Mi Young Hur is the acclaimed author of The Loom Tree, The Queens of K-Town, and Folklorn, which was an Indie Next Pick and a Best Books of the Year at NPR and The New York Times. Previously a teacher at Writopia and the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, Korea, she has a B.A. in English from Harvard and an MFA in Creative Writing from Notre Dame, where she won the Sparks Fellowship and the Sparks Prize. She is originally from California, but now lives with her family in Sweden and can be found online at AngelaHur.com.