Angie Kim’s debut novel is a genre-breaking combination of courtroom drama, thriller, mystery, and family drama. Kim deftly blends these myriad elements, a cast of complex characters, and a fascinating plot.
Miracle Creek starts—literally—with a bang as a hyperbaric oxygen chamber filled with autistic children and their parents explodes. The ensuing pages pieces together lives, lies, half-truths, and lies by omission, all recounted by seven unreliable narrators, as the arson/murder trial progresses. No one is innocent. No one is who they seem to be. Layer by layer, everyone’s flaws are revealed and events unravelled as the body count rises. Kim writes with exquisite nuances of the differences between right and wrong, slowly deconstructing each situation and the inner struggles the seven narrators undergo.
But Miracle Creek is more than a courtroom drama. It blends the lives of Korean immigrants, children with cerebral palsy or autism, and their parents with interesting twists: Munchausen by proxy syndrome, sexual assault, and the moral and ethical questions involved as, one by one, characters obstruct justice to serve their own ends or to protect their children.
Kim writes with gut-wrenching detail of life with a child on the spectrum, and is spot-on in capturing the joys and tribulations of having such a child.
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