For Your Reading List

In 1991, Latasha Harlins, a 15-year-old black girl, accused by a Korean-born convenience store owner named Soon Ja Du of attempting to shoplift a bottle of orange juice, was shot and killed by Du. Harlins died with $2 in her pocket. Du received no prison time for Harlins’ murder. This often overlooked piece of Los Angeles history, occurring 13 days after the videotaped beating of Rodney King, was a key cause of the 1992 LA riots. In Your House Will Pay, Steph Cha draws a close line between the 1991 crime, fictionalized in the story, to the political climate of modern-day LA.

The novel focuses on two families, one black and one Korean American, whose lives are once again upended by a crime based on Harlins' murder nearly three decades later. While the story predominantly takes place in the summer of 2019, it opens with a riot in LA’s Westwood neighborhood in 1991, and some chapters return to that decade to provide pieces of the narrative’s rich puzzle.

Several well-drawn, lived-in characters populate the novel: Grace, a twentysomething pharmacist who doesn't understand why her older sister Miriam is estranged from their mother; Shawn, who is trying to keep his family together after his cousin Ray is released from prison; and Jules Searcey, a journalist who keeps prying.

Cha’s prose is poignant and riveting. She writes with radiant clarity about the trauma that these crimes can inflict on children (“It worried Shawn, how easily kids absorbed the spilled poisons of the grown-up world”) and the emotional highs and lows that come with having siblings. Cha looks at the generational suffering of past crimes and seems to ask: How much of our prejudice do we inherit from our parents?

What starts as an ugly portrait of the hatred in the city and the country becomes a tender story about pursuing justice and the herculean task of finding forgiveness. Get your copy now. —Emerson Malone (@allmalone)