Scott, Joanna Catherine. The Lucky Gourd Shop.

Pocket Books, Washington Square Press. 296p. c2000. 0-743-3735-7. $13.00. SA*

When the author's adopted children, three siblings from Korea, reached adolescence, they wanted to search back to their birth roots from the orphanage from which they'd come to her. However, correspondence with that institution brought a quick end to the trail: the women who had delivered the then-preschoolers to the orphanage seemed to have been posing in familial roles, so tracing back from the information given by them was impossible. The teenagers then turned to their adoptive mother with the unusual but inspired request that, working with the few scraps of childish memories she had heard, and with her well-researched knowledge of the culture from which the youths had come, she invent the story of their ancestry. The Lucky Gourd Shop, then, is all fiction, but it stands in lieu of the author's children's true genealogy.

Set in postwar South Korea, this imagined history opens with a dramatic story-within-a-story. Mi Sook, who would become the now-American teens' birth mother, was herself found, very shortly after her birth, abandoned in a trash bin. Taken by her savior into that woman's coffee shop, she grows up in the back room of this small business even as it changes hands across the years of her childhood. Eventually, as a beautiful young woman, she catches the eye and heart of a workman from Inch'on who is nearly maddened by his wife's failure to produce an heir for him. He is the father of five daughters and a son who is mentally incompetent. This fictional birth father of the American teens, Kun Soo, is a character for whom reader sympathy is impossible, but credibility is palpable: wife beating, self-loathing, consigned to fate by his own traditionalism.

Scott weaves a highly textured tale of social roles and changing norms, individual psychologies, and the influence of Americans on the life of Mi Sook, wholly aside from her own children's eventual habitat. The poverty of Korea in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as its traditional riches of spicy foods and beautifully crafted ornaments, are brought to life vividly. In this reading group edition, a closing essay by the author discusses her family and her research into Korean culture. Francisca Goldsmith, Teen Svcs., Berkeley P.L., Berkeley, CA