Secondhand World by Katherine Min

Secondhand World, a novel by Katherine Min (Knopf): In this lucid and lyrical debut, Min offers the magnetic story of Isadora Myung Hee Sohn, an estranged Korean-American teenager struggling to understand just how it is that she, the lowly daughter, has managed to survive her ill-fated younger brother and the murder-suicide of her two parents. Offered in bracingly short chapters, the novel creates a fluid world in which monstrous changes come and go. "It's a secondhand world we're born into," Isa tells us. "What is novel to us is only so because we're newborn . . ." Min has a great talent for making the extraordinary seem like the ordinary fabric of life, while at the same time weaving a tale that is smart, assured, and completely gratifying. —Fred Leebron