Your House Will Pay – Steph Cha
Expectation: A trauma-fest ripped from the headlines.
Reality: A surprisingly balanced and detailed microhistory of early 1990s racial tensions in Los Angeles. The story had many layers that were explored in detail without making this feel like an agony dump.
My Take:
Who owns trauma? Is it a person? A family? A community?
This question is central to “Your House Will Pay,” which uses fictionalized elements of the violence that plagued Los Angeles in the 1990s to explore generational trauma and amnesty.
While police brutality against the Black community was largely publicized after Rodney King’s beating in March 1991, what was less known — to me, anyway — was the escalating tension between Blacks and Koreans that culminated in the shooting death of a Black teenage girl, Latasha Harlins, in a Korean-owned liquor store a few weeks after King’s attack.
Steph Cha uses the latter as the basis of her narrative, exploring its repercussions over decades for the two impacted families. With alternating POVs, Cha presents a rather unbiased — if somewhat too convenient and sometimes heavy-handed — story of secrets, second chances and fighting battles that aren’t yours to win.
As a debut, the narrative lacks a little polish — I found the dialogue between characters to be wooden — but Cha has good pacing and a few interesting twists that felt natural and not an agony pile-on.
However, one of the most effective components of Cha’s characterizations is how she used the dissonance between self- and social-perception to add depth to every character - even the minor ones.
This book was published a few months before George Floyd was murdered, and it has been overshadowed by more recent publications that tread similar ground. Yet, I’ve found that some of these novels use the event for shock — or treat it like a mandatory plot device — rather than as an avenue to explore how a racially-motivated event has tentacles that reach far. That’s not the case here.
I was on the fence about reading this book, because so often these stories take an emotional toll on the reader, but Cha found the balance between entertainment, education and commentary to make this as engaging as it was informative. I’m excited about where she’ll go as an author.
The audiobook was narrated by Greta Jung and Glenn Davis, and I appreciated the authenticity used with the talent. Davis, as Shawn Matthews, was great from top-to-bottom, but Jung was slightly uneven, always quasi-yelling her dialogue when Grace Park was nervous.
As mentioned above, the dialogue throughout the novel is a little wonky, so this could have simply been Jung overexaggerating a shortcoming of the novel. At one point I laughed out loud at an interaction that was absolutely not intended to be funny, because her delivery was so over the top. Still, it’s not a bad way to experience “House.”
Rating (story): 4/5 stars
Rating (narration): 3.5/5 stars
Format: Audiobook (library loan)
Dates read: May 25 – May 31, 2023
Multi-tasking: Good to go. The structure is easy to follow and the writing is accessible, but there are a lot of characters so it’s best to engage in activities that allow you to pay attention.
