cover image The Photograph

The Photograph

Joe Porcelli. Gibbs Smith Publishers, $22.95 (346pp) ISBN 978-0-941711-30-2

Numerous cliches, a penchant for melodrama and a dubious central coincidence somehow fail to spoil this gripping tale, which follows the odyssey of young Bok Chang Kimboy from his war-torn home in a South Korean fishing village to an affluent upbringing in the American South and manhood and another war, in Vietnam. When six-year-old Bok's parents are murdered by North Korean soldiers during the early days of the Korean War, he and his older brother, Yoon, are left alone. Relying on each other and the occasional friendly stranger, the boys work their way south, enduring hunger, bitter winters, captivity, omnipresent violence and, eventually, separation from each another. Adopted by an American officer who raises him on an old Charleston, S.C., estate, Bok grows up to graduate from the Citadel and exorcise his personal demons in the jungle battles of Vietnam. First-novelist Porcelli succumbs to some stock characters-a kindly priest, a noble prostitute, a Southern patrician and commonsensical African American servants. His prose, at times, is overwrought with trite, emotional rhetoric, and some plot elements are too pat. But Bok is complex and engaging, and his dramatic journey-especially his tribulations in Korea-comes alive in colorful storytelling, which succeeds in capturing the reader's imagination and sympathy. (Nov.)