Marie Myung-Ok Lee Books In Order
Book links take you to Amazon. As an Amazon Associate I earn money from qualifying purchases.Publication Order of Finding My Voice Books
Publication Order of Standalone Novels
If It Hadn't Been for Yoon Jun | (1993) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Necessary Roughness | (1996) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Night of the Chupacabras | (1998) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
F Is for Fabuloso | (1999) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Somebody's Daughter | (2005) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Evening Hero | (2022) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Hurt You | (2023) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Publication Order of An Avon Camelot Book Books
Lisa and Lottie | (1949) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Summerdog Comes Home | (1980) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
A Hippopotamus Ate the Teacher | (1981) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Baseball Fever | (1981) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Irma and Jerry | (1982) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Basic Fun | (1982) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Summerdog | (1983) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Esp McGee | (1983) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Tunnel to Yesterday | (1983) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Bet You Can! Science Possibilities to Fool You | (1983) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Earth Is Flat and Other Great Mistakes | (1983) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Bet You Can't! | (1983) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Peggy Fleming: Portrait of an Iceskater | (1984) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Maura's Angel | (1984) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Jellyfish Season | (1985) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Book 1 | (1985) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Behind the Attic Wall | (1985) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Mystery of the Melted Diamonds | (1986) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Ukrainian Egg Mystery | (1986) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Moroccan Mystery | (1986) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Ralph Fozbek and the Amazing Black Hole Patrol | (1986) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Flash Fry, Private Eye | (1986) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Anti-Peggy Plot | (1986) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Best Joke Book for Kids 2 | (1987) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Codebreaker Kids | (1987) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Case of the Lost Look-Alike | (1988) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Breezy | (1988) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Racing the Sun | (1988) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Anne Frank | (1989) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Case of the Vanishing Villain | (1990) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
A Haunting in Williamsburg | (1990) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Best Ever Kids' Book of Lists | (1991) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Adventures of King Midas | (1992) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Ask Me Anything About the Presidents | (1992) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Ghost Brother | (1992) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Tons of Trash | (1992) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Maria, a Christmas Story | (1992) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
How to Travel Through Time | (1993) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Lucie Babbidge's House | (1993) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Christmas Countdown | (1993) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Miss Yonkers Goes Bonkers | (1994) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Mummy's Curse | (1994) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Devil's Bridge | (1994) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
B.J.'s Billion-Dollar Bet | (1994) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Heart of a Champion | (1994) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Super Snoop Sam Snout and the Case of the Missing Marble | (1994) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Main Street | (1994) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Comet Luck | (1994) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Kwanzaa | (1995) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Ali Baba Bernstein, Lost and Found | (1995) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Vampire Mom | (1995) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Spookhouse | (1995) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Going for the Gold: Shannon Miller | (1996) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Four Perfect Pebbles | (1996) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Zombie Queen | (1996) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Freak Show | (1996) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Going to Net: Girl's Gde | (1996) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Tracks in the Snow | (1997) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Danger Along the Ohio | (1997) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Painting the Black | (1997) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
No Pretty Pictures: A Child of War | (1998) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Night of the Chupacabras | (1998) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Becoming Felix | (1998) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Breakaway | (1998) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Mischief, Mad Mary, and Me | (1998) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
As Ever, Gordy | (1998) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
It's In Your Hands, Daisy P. Duckwitz | (1998) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Leaving Summer | (1998) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Flea Circus Summer | (1998) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Harry the Poisonous Centipede | (1998) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Calling Me Home | (1998) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Pizza That Time Forgot | (1999) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Love Me, Love My Broccoli | (1999) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Get on the Net | (1999) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Don't Try This at Home! | (1999) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Bruce Coville's Shapeshifters | (1999) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
A Kids' Guide to America's Bill of Rights | (1999) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Bruce Coville's Alien Visitors | (1999) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Green Mango Magic | (1999) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Lasting Echoes | (1999) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
All the Answers | (2000) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Can of Worms | (2000) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Orphan Journey Home | (2000) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Alice-by-Accident | (2000) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Bearstone | (2008) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Trouble with Tuck | (2009) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
My Own Two Feet | (2009) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Get Rich Mitch! | (2012) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Summer Camp Creeps | (2013) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Gremlins | (2023) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Publication Order of Anthologies
Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York | (2013) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Providence Noir | (2015) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Marie Myung-Ok Lee
Marie Myung-Ok Lee is an acclaimed Korean-American author. She’s written “Finding My Voice”, which is thought to be the first contemporary set Asian American YA novel.
Marie is one of just a handful of American journalists that have been granted a visa to North Korea since the Korean War. She was the first Fulbright Scholar to Korea in creative writing and has received many honors for her work, which includes the Best Book Award from the Friends of American Writers, an O. Henry honorable mention, and a New York Foundation for the Arts fiction fellowship.
Her essays and stories have been published in Guernica, Slate, Salon, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, The Guardian, and The Nation, as well as others. She is a founder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and she teaches creative writing at Columbia.
“Finding My Voice” is the first novel in the “Ellen Sung” series and was released in 1992. Ellen Sung, age seventeen, only wants to be like everybody else at her all-white school. However the racist bullies of Arkin, Minnesota are never going to let her forget that she is different, as she is the youngest member of the one and only Korean-American family in the town.
Ellen, right at the very beginning of her senior year, finds herself falling for Tomper Sandel, this football player that’s blond, popular, and undeniably cute. Much to her surprise, he falls for her, as well. Now Ellen has got a chance at life that she had never imagined, one which defies the expectations of merely hanging out with her core group of friends or pleasing her parents. However could her romance with Tomper be strong to withstand her family’s disapproval and hometown bigotry?
“Somebody’s Daughter” is a stand alone novel and was released in 2005. Marie delivers a heartbreaking and heartwarming tale about a Korean-American girl’s search for her own roots.
This is the story about Sarah Thorson (nineteen years old) who got adopted as a baby by this Lutheran couple in the Midwest. After she dropped out of college, she decides to study in Korea and gets increasingly intrigued by her own Korean heritage, eventually embarking on this crusade to find her birth mom.
Paralleling Sarah’s story is that of Kyung-sook, who got forced by tough circumstances to allow her baby get swept away from her immediately after she was born, however who has always longed for her lost child.
“The Evening Hero” is a stand alone novel and was released in 2022. A Korean immigrant that pursues the American dream that has to face the secrets of the past or risk watching the world that he has worked so very hard to build come crumbling down.
Dr. Yungman Kwak is now in the twilight of his life. Every day for the past fifty years, he’s brushed his teeth, slipped his shoes on, and headed to Horse Breath’s General Hospital. It’s here that, as an obstetrician, he treats the babies and women of the small rural Minnesota town that he chose to call home.
This was the life that he had longed for. The so-called American dream. He immigrated from Korea after the end of the Korean War, forced to leave his ancestors, family, village, and everything he knew behind him. However his life’s built on a lie. And one day, this letter arrives which threatens to expose it.
Yungman’s life gets thrown into chaos, the hospital closes abruptly, his wife has refused to spend any time with him, and his son is busy investing in this struggling health start up. Yungman is facing a decision: he has to choose to hide his secret from his friends and family or confess and possibly lose everything that he has built up to now. He starts questioning the very assumptions on which his entire life is built, the so-called American dream, with the abject failure of its healthcare system, neighbors, and patients that perpetuate racism, a town that’s flawed with infrastructure, and a history which does not see him in it.
Toggling between the present and past, America and Korea, this is a melodic, soulful, and rhapsodic novel about a guy that is looking back at his life and asking some big questions about what’s lost and what’s gained when immigrants leave home, heading for new shores.
“Hurt You” is a stand alone novel and was released in 2023. With echoes of Jason Reynolds and Marijke Nijkamp, this one tells the tragic story about a Korean-American teen that fights to protect herself and her neurodivergent elder brother from this hostile community.
Inspired by the unabashed social realism of Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men”, this novel moves beyond the quasi-fraternal bond of Lenny and George to explore this actual sibling bond of Georgia (sister to Leonardo da Vinci Daewoo Kim), who has this unnamed neurological disability which resembles autism. The disability, race, and class themes spin themselves out not on a ranch but in this suburban high school where the Kim family has moved out of the city for better services for Leonardo.
All of a sudden unmoored from the familiar, which includes the support of her Aunt Clara, Georgia struggles to find her own place in this Asian-American majority school where the whites still dominate culturally, and she finds herself also not really feeling “Korean enough”. Her only pole star is her commitment to her brother, which is a loyalty that finds itself at odds with her immigrant parents’ dreams for her, and this racist and ableist society which might bring violence to Leonardo despite some of her best efforts to protect him.
Steinbeck was rather fearless about bringing his tales to realistic (not tidy) conclusions which reflected actual society back in the 1930s. Lenny was (to some eyes) a killer and a monsters. In the 2020s, this reflects statistics which a person with intellectual disability is far more likely to be a victim, and not a perpetrator, of violent crimes, despite enduring stereotypes which they are the ones that should actually be feared.
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