Marie Myung-Ok Lee Books In Order

Publication Order of Finding My Voice Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of An Avon Camelot Book Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

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.