Maureen Sun
Maureen Sun has lived and worked in the U.S., England, France, Korea, and Hong Kong, and taught literature at Princeton, Barnard, NYU, and the University of Hong Kong. She is at work on a second novel.
In Maureen Sun’s retelling of the Dostoevsky classic, the characters of Dmitri, Ivan and Alyosha are loosely recast as sisters Minah, Sarah, and Esther. Their father, Eugene Kim, physically and emotionally abused the three daughters and their mother, Jeonghee, without consequence and “beyond repair.” Now, he stares down a terminal cancer diagnosis and has summoned his children to his side. This turn for the worse, which might be lazily read as the sort of divine order that Ivan adamantly rejects, opens a nuanced consideration of restorative versus retributive justice. This section of the novel follows Sarah as she alights on the idea that there is no justice for those insulated, “protected from their own guilt,” in one way or another, and in moments like these Sun reminds us of the vitality and endless relevance of the original.