The start of the rainy season in June means a break in the stifling heat and humidity, but it brings a new, deeper awareness to 11-year-old Junehee of the tension that binds her family in this riveting narrative set in Korea in the 1960s. Junehee's father is a military officer who has become more and more disconnected and emotionally distant from his wife and children over the years. Her paternal grandmother, who lives with the family, has asserted more and more control over Junehee's mother and the children as a result. Junehee's mother has endured both conditions with the silence that tradition seems to dictate. But tradition clashes with desire when Junehee's mother longs to keep a boy whom the family takes in temporarily after he is orphaned as the result of a mud slide brought on by the heavy rains. Junehee, a middle child, becomes a keen-eyed observer of her mother's unrelenting sadness, a sadness that Junehee realizes has gone on far longer than the rains. Helen Kim's emotionally acute novel about a child's growing awareness of her mother's powerlessness and pain is beautifully written, and not without hope. (Age 12 and older)

Junehee Lee lives in Seoul in a house full of women: three sisters, a busybody grandmother, and, always, everywhere, her mother. Her father spends much of his rtime in America working for the army--or out drinking with friends. When an orphaned boy comes to stay with the Lees, all the carefully balanced conflicts in the family erupt. Filled with closely observed details of Korean life, The Long Season of Rain is an unforgettable coming-of-age saga of great power.