With a charming cast of characters and a plot that leaves no detail overlooked, The Boathouse draws the reader into an invisible world.

“Wounds passed on from those who came before—fire, water, and primal memories seen through dreams.”

This novel begins with an evocative description of the titular Boathouse. Four sections follow, each named after the number of people who lived in the Boathouse at a given time. Because the Boathouse is always chilly due to its proximity to the water, the people who live there keep the fire going in the hearth, and are visited by strange dreams when they fall asleep next to a view of the river. These are memories of other people, passed down the generations through DNA to return as dreams: about the wars of Native American ancestors, about a father who died serving in Myanmar, about a star-crossed mother and father. Heartbreaking tales from across time and space haunt characters who live in the present.

These primal memories do not pull the narrative away from reality. The lead characters are all minorities in some way, with Seo Ji-hyang, Choi Yeon-ji, and Jang Yu-jae being Korean-Americans, and Philip Keme Campbell being of Mohawk descent. The time they spend in the titular Boathouse reveals keen insights into what it means to live in a society shaped by imperialism, slavery, and racism. The story lingers on the stares endured by visible minorities, on the violent replacement of native place names with English ones. However, when a character revisits the same restaurant from twenty years ago, the past does not repeat itself. American attitudes have changed."

Lee Sookjong

Born in Eumseong, North Chungcheong Province in 1958, Lee grew up in Seoul before moving to the United States. She made her literary debut in 1997 through the Korea Times Daily’s Spring Literary Competition in the fiction category, and in 2005 through the Korea Daily’s Spring Literary Competition in the literary criticism category. Lee majored in comparative literature at Queens College, City University of New York.