Review: A woman tries to right 105 years of her mistakes in 'The Apology'

"I was looking for a second chance even in death," narrates the protagonist of Jimin Han's second novel, "The Apology." Jeonga Cha is a wholly original character, the ghost of a wealthy Korean centenarian whose decisions — made to protect her wealth and her family's reputation — come back to haunt her, quite literally.

Jeonga has had an enviable life by many standards: wealthy, in relatively good health by the ripe age of 105, a member of a family whose power and influence are admired by other wealthy families in her homeland of Korea.

However, Jeonga also has secrets and regrets. As she announces in the opening chapter, "What didn't help the health of the family was removed, like the branch of a tree for pruning. It had been done before. That was the way it had always been done. But now I had doubts."

One of Jeonga's acts of "pruning" was to break up her son's romance with a girl from lower-class origins. After Jeonga's son, Gwangmu, impregnates the family tutor's daughter, Jeonga sends the girl far away to the United States so that the rest of Jeonga's family and wealthy friends won't find out about the relationship.

Eventually, her son, Gwangmu, also leaves for the U.S., where he dies before he and his mother can reconcile.

Jeonga's decision has further reverberations: Gwangmu's ex-lover's granddaughter in the U.S. meets one of Jeonga's great-grandnephews in college and falls in love. The young couple decide to marry, not realizing they are distantly related.

All of this complicated back story is told largely in summary. The novel begins long after these events, when the elderly Jeonga decides to travel to the U.S. with a vague plan to prevent the marriage.

While such a plot could have been the stuff of tragedy, Han mines the material largely for its comic potential. Whether dead or alive, Jeonga is a larger-than-life character, stubborn, judgmental, always active. Even when trying to materialize through the video screen on the back seat of a plane, her ghost cannot resist commenting on the tackiness of economy class: "Unlike the business-class seats that my sisters occupied, the accommodations here were cheap. Itchy polyester in a tweed cross-hatch of royal blue, yellow, and lime green."

Eventually, Jeonga the ghost attempts to harness her powers to try to send messages to the living family members whose lives she has impacted and, in many instances, harmed. While Jeonga declares repeatedly that she is acting to save the family from "doom," readers may not share her sense of urgency in essentially protecting the perceived purity of the family's bloodline.

Han was born in Seoul, South Korea, and grew up in the United States. In addition to a previous novel, "A Small Revolution," she has written for American Public Media's "Weekend America," "Poets & Writers" and other outlets. Her "The Apology" is an imaginative work that draws upon traditional Korean Buddhist beliefs about the afterlife to explore the long-term consequences of decisions made under the value system of a different era.

May-lee Chai is the American Book Award-winning author of the short story collections "Useful Phrases for Immigrants" and "Tomorrow in Shanghai & Other Stories."

The Apology

By: Jimin Han.

Publisher: Little, Brown, 304 pages, $28.