Equal parts fantastical—a pair of talking dolls help twins escape a stifling home, a heart boils on the stove as part of an elaborate cure for melancholy—and true to life—a mother and daughter try to heal their rift when the daughter falls unexpectedly pregnant, a woman reexamines her father's legacy after his death—the stories in this collection are hopeful and heartbreaking, full of danger and full of joy.
A fantastic medley of short stories that dance between literary fiction, fable, Korean folklore, and science fiction ... Wildly entertaining, wonderfully diverse, and always delivered with a superb understanding of pacing and economy of language, the stories in this collection are full of emotional intelligence but also prove Chung isn't afraid to explore what genre mixing can do for short narratives ... None of the 15 stories are mediocre ... The fabulist takes and great writing make Green Frog a great collection, but the way Chung works feminism and otherness, while almost always centering Korean or Korean American woman, is what makes this a must read.
Chung doesn’t need magic realism or science fiction to tell her stories. The most touching stories, which are for that reason the strongest ones, don’t need anything but her knack for getting to the heart (literally) of relations, between people and between individuals and themselves.
Glimmering ... Taken all together, the volume’s 15 stories defy categorization. Instead, they slip between genres and realities ... What binds them together isn’t any one genre or subject, but Chung’s impressive, highly evocative ability to linger in the liminal.
