An endlessly discussable book club choice with complicated characters and emotional decisions that have to be made.

A story that will leave you virtually speechless while perfectly encompasses society and racial tensions today. I commend the author in her approach to a story, showing both sides of the violence, humanizing each and showing how it affects everyone both in the short and long term. I loved every character; each one had my heart and what stood out the most is there were no villains in a story surrounded in violence. I highly recommend this read to everyone.

I had a difficult time getting into this novel. I tried several times, several false starts, and couldn't seem to get beyond the opening few chapters. Fortunately, I was aware of the buzz surrounding the book, the critical acclaim, the positive words expressed about it by writers I admire and enjoy. I thought back to a similar experience I'd had, years ago, in struggling through the first forty pages or so of Dennis Lehane's MYSTIC RIVER. I thought of the fervor in which I turned the pages once I dedicated myself to persevering through the opening pages of that novel. To this day, MYSTIC RIVER is one of my favorite reads. So why did I struggle so in my first attempts at reading it? I don't know, but I'm glad that I muddled on, however uninspired, until that novel gripped me and refused to loosen its hold. I've now had an equal experience with Steph Cha's YOUR HOUSE WILL PAY. This is a gut-punch of a novel, with tender and real renderings of a diverse cast of characters, two families bound by trauma, and writing so beautiful I found myself speaking to the words. Once again, I have no idea why I struggled so to engage with this novel in the beginning, but I can say unequivocally that this is a masterpiece. The story is simple enough: an unarmed black child is killed by a Korean woman manning the cash register in a store, and that dramatic act changes the course of two families over the course of three decades. It's a story far too familiar in this country. Based in part on the real life story of Latasha Harlins, who was gunned down in the shadows of the Rodney King incident in the early 90s. Cha has taken the sketches of that tragedy and created something fictional but resonant. This novel deserves all of the accolades it has received. And I'm the better for having read it.

An expertly paced, very moving story of action and eventual reaction between races in Los Angeles. The plot could have been pedantic, but flowed nicely without playing sides. I liked this book a lot.

Damn that was a good book. I wish I had read it in time to nominate for LibraryReads! *sad face* Definitely one of my favorite books of 2019. I think the author did a wonderful job balancing two difficult and nuanced stories.

Your House Will Pay by Steph Cha explores the racial tensions that exist between Korean and Black Americans in California that were born out of the L.A. Riots in 1991. The events that are described in the novel from the riots are based on the true story of a Korean shop owner who shot and killed a teen-aged Black girl who the shop owner believed to be stealing from her store. The novel itself is set in present day, exploring the outfall of the fictionalized version of this event for both the Korean and Black families affected.

Steph Cha has written an immersive, layered, and compulsively readable contemporary story about race in America, while being sensitive to the history and origins of racial tensions in Los Angeles. Through her main character Grace, she does an excellent job illustrating the line many of us walk, where we want disenfranchised populations to have justice for the crimes against them, but also how our own familial and cultural ties might be at odds with this larger sense of justice. I also appreciated the angle Steph Cha chose for this story, focusing on Korean and Black tensions that are not often discussed in the context of the #BLM movement and may not have the most straightforward of origins.

Overall, a great read, though it may fall flat if as a reader, you are expecting a story more deeply rooted in the Black Lives Matter social justice movement. This is just one story of thousands that exist, and while the larger context exists in the novel, it's as a backdrop to the story of these two families.

This was a fascinating narrative following a Black and a Korean-American family, and how their lives are connected by two shootings. It worked particularly well as an audiobook (with two narrators), and prompted some interesting discussions about racism and a family reckoning of sorts. For me it felt a little drawn out in parts midway, but the ending came together really strong and with some clever twists in the plot that made for a satisfying closure to this story. Well worth checking out.

Many thanks to Ecco, Netgalley and HarperAudio for advances copies.

The quality that distinguishes Cha from other top-tier mystery writers is her absolute fearlessness in using fiction to address ticklish political issues. Your House Will Pay is impressive. I read it free and early thanks to Net Galley and Harper Collins. I am a little sick at heart that I’m so late with my review, but this book is rightfully getting a lot of conversations started without me. It’s for sale now, and you should get it and read it.

Our two protagonists are Grace Park and Shawn Matthews. They don’t know each other, but their families intersected one critical day many years ago. The Parks are Korean immigrants, the owners of a small pharmacy. The Matthews family is African-American, and they have never stopped grieving the loss of sixteen-year-old Ava, who was shot and killed one evening by Grace’s mother in a moment of rage and panic. The other thing shared by Grace and Shawn is that both were quite young when it happened. Shawn was with his older sister when she was killed and has memories of what happened; Grace has been shielded from the event and knows nothing about it until the past opens itself up in a way that is shocking and very public.

The story alternates between the initial event, which happened in the 1990s, and today; it also alternates between the Park family and the Matthews’. The development of the characters—primarily Grace and Shawn, but also Shawn’s brother, Ray and a handful of other side characters—is stellar. Throughout the story I watch for the moment when the narrative will bend, when we will see which of these two scarred, bitter families is more in the right, or has the more valid grievance. It never happens. Cha plays it straight down the middle. Both families have been through hell; both have made serious mistakes, crimes against one another. And ultimately they share one more terrible attribute: both families have been callously under-served by the cops and local government, for which relatively poor, powerless, nonwhite families are the dead last priority.

Cha bases her story on a real event, and she explains this in the author’s notes at the end of the book.

As a reviewer, I am closer to this than many will be: my family is a blend of Caucasians, Asian immigrants, and African-Americans. I read multiple galleys at a time, shifting from one to another throughout the reading parts of my day, but it is this story that I thought about when I wasn’t reading anything.

The first book that I read by this author was from her detective series. When I saw that she had a galley up for review, I was initially disappointed that this wasn’t a Juniper Song mystery, but now that I have seen what Cha is doing and where she is going with it, I see that this had to be a stand-alone novel. There isn’t one thing about it that I would change.Highly recommended to those that love the genre and that cherish civil rights in the U.S.; a must-read.

Such a powerful and important book. Steph Cha does an amazing job switching between the voices of the characters, especially given how different they are. The complexity of the characters is astonishing. Everyone should read this book.

4.5 stars

It’s not often that a book I read impacted me so much that I was rendered virtually speechless immediately afterwards — to the point that despite having finished this book several days ago, I had to wait to write this review because I needed time to regroup and gather my thoughts. The reason this book impacted me so much is because the subject matter it covered hit a little too close to home for me, as it brought back memories from 27 years ago and emotions that felt so real, I truly felt like I had been transported back in time to my childhood. Back then, my family lived in a little enclave of apartment buildings in Westchester, near its border with Inglewood in Los Angeles. Nearby, within walking distance, was a tiny strip mall with a donut shop, a laundromat, a small restaurant, and a Korean-owned liquor store on the very corner — a setup similar to the neighborhoods that the main characters in the book lived in during their youth.

The story, especially the events that took place during the “past” timeline of 1991 and 1992, was tremendously familiar to me because it aligned with much of what I remember experiencing growing up as an Asian American in the Los Angeles of the 1990s. I remember what happened to Latasha Harlins and the public outrage over the light sentence that Soon Ja Du ended up getting; I remember the already simmering tensions between the African American and Korean communities that were further exacerbated by the Harlins case; I remember the Rodney King beating that took place around that time as well as the infamous acquittal that came down a year later; and of course, I remember the LA Riots and the devastation that took place those 6 days. I was 13 years old at the time (around the same age as one of the main characters in the book when the story opened) and when the riots broke out, I remember most of us were still at school, anxiously waiting for our parents to come pick us up. Our school wasn’t close in proximity to the riot area fortunately, however, due to the chaotic nature of things and the fear that the rioting might spread to other areas, it was advised for all the schools to shut down for the day. As we waited for our rides, there was a lot of nervous chatter among our group of friends, as many of them either had long commutes home or they would have to pass by the areas where much of the rioting was beginning to gain traction. Adding to those fears, we had heard that rioters had started venting out their anger at innocent bystanders, stopping random cars and pulling people out and beating them (a “rumor” that was confirmed later that night on the news when we all witnessed in horror the terrifying events that unfolded at the intersection of Florence and Normandie). The looting and burning down of stores followed, with the devastation spilling over to surrounding cities – news coverage showed chaotic scenes, with the destruction hitting heaviest in South Los Angeles and Koreatown (which had become a target due to the Latasha Harlins case). It was the worst time to be out in the streets – in fact, it was the worst time to be anywhere other than hidden away in the safety of our own homes with doors locked, windows barred, blinds drawn.

The experience of reading this book felt almost surreal to me. Even though the entire story was a fictionalized version based on past events and many of the details had been changed, plus a majority of the timeline focused on present day (2019) and how the various characters dealt with the aftermath of what had happened so long ago, the memories it triggered were enough to bring the real-life events the story was based on back to life for me. The author Steph Cha did a great job capturing the sentiments and perspectives of both the African American and Korean communities during that period in history, but what floored me the most was how vividly she was able to depict the realities of what life was like growing up in Los Angeles in the 1990s, not just for people of color, but also for immigrants and others who were part of the community at the time.

Ten years after the riots occurred, on the way to visit friends, I happened to be driving through one of the areas hit hardest by the riots and I will never forget the shock I felt seeing how much of the area never got rebuilt. Steph Cha captured my sentiments exactly when, in the book, she described what one of the main characters, Shawn Matthews, saw when he was surveying the devastation that had taken place around him right after the fictionalized riots in the story: “Wherever he went, he saw the extent of the ruin, the cooled remnants of days of unchecked wrath. Where there had been buildings, there were now building frames like children’s pictures scribbled in pencil, gray and blurred and skeletal, on the verge of disintegration. Roll-up doors defaced by graffiti and ash, the metal warped so they’d never close again. Rubble and trash littered the streets like fallen teeth, like dead skin, the rot of a ravaged body.” This was actually the reality of what I saw as well, many years later – and even now, nearly 3 decades later, some remnants of the devastation still exists, albeit in smaller pockets.

To come across a book like this one, that captures a history and time period and even elements of a culture that I was once so familiar with on a personal level – THIS is one of the reasons why I read. With that said, I did struggle with the rating on this one, wavering between 4.5 and 5 stars…in the end, I decided on 4.5 stars, mostly because I’m not sure how I feel about the story’s ending and the way things played out. Needless to say, this is a book I definitely recommend, though word of warning, this is not an easy one to read, especially if you have a personal connection to parts of the story like I did.

Received ARC from HarperCollins (Ecco) via NetGalley.

Masterful job by Cha of taking the subject of racial tension and serving in up in an original and gripping story. The story takes place in L.A. in the aftermath of the Rodney King shooting and racial tension is high. Teenager Ava is shot and killed by a Korean store owner and does not serve time. The story is told alternately by Ava’s brother Shawn who was with Ava when she was killed and Korean American Grace whose sister Miriam is estranged from her mother. I got an intimate look into each family and the pain, anger and devastation that senseless loss of life causes. I held my breath as the story took a turn and the two families lives intersected over another brutal act of violence. It is an emotional and realistic story in that we still have not figured out how to mend the divide and value each other’s differences and lives. Thank you to Netgalley for the free ARC in exchange for my honest review.

What is justice? How can we love people who do evil? Can someone be a good person in one realm and evil in another? These are just a few of the pressing questions Steph Cha’ examines in Your House Will Pay. The story opens in 1991, with Shawn, his cousin Ray, and his sister Ava witnessing a riot and getting caught up in the fever. Then it jumps to 2019 where Grace Park meets her sister Miriam at a rally protesting yet another LA Police shooting of an unarmed young man. Meanwhile, the now adult Shawn is picking up Ray who has spent the last ten years in prison.

The narrative goes back and forth from Shawn to Grace. Grace’s sister is estranged from her family and no one tells Grace what happened. Nonetheless, she is determined to stay connected to Miriam. Meanwhile, Shawn recognizes that his cousin is both grateful and resentful that Shawn has been there for his wife and kids while he was in prison. Shawn hopes Ray wlll settle down as he did after his time in prison, though Ray seems to be heading back into trouble.

When Grace’s mother is shot right in front of her, the two seemingly separate narratives come together. Along with Grace, we discover that Grace’s mother once shot and killed Shawn’s sister Ava. She was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to probation, changed her name, and seemed to live without repercussions. For Shawn, it was proof that in this country, Black lives don’t matter.



This is not a mystery, even though both Shawn and Grace figure out who shot her mother. The question becomes one of revenge, forgiveness, and justice. Can Grace both love her mother and hate what she did? Will loving her mother make her accept and perhaps become evil? Does shooting Grace’s mother achieve some form of justice, of fulfillment of the past?

This story is compelling. It was hard to put down even though I sometimes was frustrated by Grace’s passivity in the beginning. Both Shawn and Grace live in families that don’t talk about what really matters, that hold things to themselves. Your House Will Payi s full of tough questions and compelling answers.

I received an e-galley of Your House Will Pay from the publisher through NetGalley

Your House Will Pay at Harper Collins
Steph Cha author site

This book revisits one of the sparks that ignited the L.A. riots in 1992, a shooting of a black teenager (Latasha Harlins) in the back of the head by a Korean liquor store owner (Soon Ja Du). The shooter doesn’t serve jail time, claiming self defense. This race conflict between these two groups intensified during the riots. This is history. The book takes this history and brings us to today, with fictional characters, as Eva Matthews being the dead teen and Yvonne Park as the shooter.

The book takes place mostly in today, 2019, where Yvonne Park is now the victim. The novel is told in alternating points of view by the family members that were witnesses to the shootings, Shawn, the 1992 brother of Eva, and Grace Park the youngest daughter of Yvonne.

The book explores race relations, but more specifically the devastation of a shooting, in this case two shootings, and what it does to both families, both long term and immediately. There’s a lot packed into this book and the author did a good job in the form and writing. Perhaps there were a couple missteps, but they can be forgiven for the overall messiness of this subject. There are no easy answers, yet I feel there is some hope given here, in the end. And yes throughout as well, with Shawn Matthews wanting a simple life, with a regular job and family close to him. Something we can all identify and agree with, to get beyond the anger and have peace.

“Your House Will Pay” by Steph Cha, Ecco, 320 pages, Oct. 15, 2019.

In 1991, Shawn Matthews, 13, and his sister, Ava, 16, who are black, are waiting in line at the movie theater in Los Angeles. The movie is canceled and people loot nearby stores.

Lately, Korean store owners are being robbed by gangs. One morning, Ava and Shawn are buying milk in a liquor store when the store’s owner, Jung-Ja Han, mistakenly believes that Ava is shoplifting.

Jung-Ja Han accuses her and grabs her by the sweatshirt. Ava fights her. Ava then turn her back and Jung-Ja Han shoots Ava in the back of the head, killing her. She is convicted of voluntary manslaughter, but sentenced to only probation.

Fast forward to 2019. Grace Park lives at home with her Korean-immigrant parents. She is a pharmacist in her family’s store. Her sister, Miriam, stopped talking to their mother two years earlier. Grace doesn’t know why. Grace and Miriam attend a memorial service for a black teen killed by a police officer.

Shawn’s cousin Ray Holloway is newly released from prison after serving 10 years for armed robbery. Shawn helped Ray’s wife and kids while Ray was in prison. Ray was in trouble for years. Shawn, who also served a term in prison, has a girlfriend named Jazz, who has a young daughter. He works for a moving company. Shawn gets Ray a job with he mover, but he quits after three weeks.

Grace’s world is suddenly shattered when her mother, Yvonne, is shot in a drive-by shooting. Then Miriam asks her what if their mother is being punished.

Then the two story lines begin to come together. This is slow moving. It isn’t a mystery, it is a character-driven novel about racism. The ending doesn’t resolve everything.

In accordance with FTC guidelines, the advance reader's edition of this book was provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for a review.

“Maybe this was just how the world worked: people forgot awful truths all the time, or at least forgot to remember.”

This book was unexpected, and wonderful. It takes a mature, nuanced, and empathic look at racial tensions and injustice evolving throughout the recent history of Los Angeles. Two families are living in modern LA that seemingly have nothing in common - one black, experiencing extreme racial prejudice, death, gang violence, and imprisonment, and one Korean, living an almost idyllic life in the suburbs. However, these two families are connected in ways that most couldn't imagine until an act of violence in the summer of 2019 reveals some truths about an act of violence almost 30 years previous.

What's so powerful and sad about this book is that you can pretty much predict the plot twists and turns as they come. That doesn't mean the book is poorly written or lacking nuance. It just means that the inequality in our justice system has become so predictable that we can sadly see the violence and injustice coming from a mile away. To me, that makes it as timely as anything else you could be reading now about racial violence and prejudice, and worth anyone's time.

Cha's writing, as I mentioned, is mature, and full of empathy. She somehow manages to make almost every character sympathetic, even those you really want to hate. In these big, messy issues, those on each side always thinks they are right, and she attempts to explain how it is that people could justify behavior that others think unbelievable and reprehensible.

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

The author’s note in YOUR HOUSE WILL PAY states that the book was inspired by the 1991 shooting death of fifteen-year-old Latasha Harlins by liquor store cashier Soon Ja Du. Cha’s book focuses on the ramifications of a similar incident, where sixteen-year-old Ava Matthews is shot in the head by a Korean liquor store owner after an altercation involving a container of milk, which escalated racial tension and rioting.

After witnessing his sister getting shot in the back of the head, Shawn Matthews, Ava’s brother, embraced the gang life. But in present time, in his forties, he’s trying to stay clean. He’s in a committed relationship with a nurse, acts as surrogate father to her young daughter, and works a backbreaking job as a mover. He also cares for his cousin Ray’s wife and teenaged children. Ray gets released from prison and, to Shawn’s dismay, falls back into bad habits, and a new violent incident related to Ava’s death has the potential to destroy Shawn’s extended family.

Grace Park has no idea of her family’s ties to the murder of Ava Matthews. She’s doing her duty as a good daughter by working in the family’s pharmacy while her heart breaks over the estrangement of her older sister from their parents. The violence that occurred before Grace was born has modern day ramifications that threaten her sheltered existence. She does her best to cope with her horrifying new normal while being vilified on social media.

The book toggles between Shawn and Grace’s points of view, showing their very different lives as well as the tension between the African-American and Korean-American communities around Los Angeles. The only way to break the cycle of violence is through family and forgiveness and sacrifice even when a extended olive branch was what triggered the collision of past and present.

YOUR HOUSE MUST PAY is a powerful book, which features relatable characters and their struggles to exist in a world where they are judged by the color of their skin. I was particularly moved by Shawn’s constant need to portray himself as harmless, by bringing his girlfriend’s daughter with him to be seen as a father figure rather than a threat, and how he came to adapt to having his every action analyzed through an extremely biased lens.

Thanks to NetGalley and Ecco An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, for providing an Advance Reader Copy.

I appreciate what author Steph Cha attempted to do with this novel. Taking from a troubled piece of recent history, (the 1992 LA Race Riots) Cha examines its long term effects on various family members & communities that were involved. A timely lesson that history often repeats itself and we are doomed if we fail to learn from these shocking acts of violence.
This book is getting lots of good press and I’m pleased for the author. Unfortunately for me, I found the story a bit too Young Adult in its writing and pacing. I was not fully engaged in the storytelling and I found myself bored and mostly dissatisfied. In this instance I am probably the wrong reader to review this particular book.
Thank you to NetGalley and HarperCollins Publishers for providing me with an ARC.

An extraordinary novel about two families bound up in a past tragedy and the sacrifices they make to rebuild their lives. While there is a crime and a mystery - a Korean immigrant working in a small shop in South Central at the time of the Rodney King riots shot and killed a teenager, went into hiding, and years later is shot, the family of the girl she killed coming under suspicion - it's more an exploration of family relationships, the pull of loyalty, and the complexity of race relations in a nation that hasn't come to terms with its own history. Based on a real event, Steph Cha has pulled at the threads of prejudice, assumptions, flawed policing, and our own eagerness to find guilt that bind up a moment of violence and teases them apart through the lives of two families and their efforts to survive a moment of violence that changed everything. This could be the author's breakout novel. It's stunning.

Painful haunting raw set in la race relations a young black girl killed by a Korean grocer the horror turmoil that ensues from this act.The writing the emotions this is a book that will engender discussion deserves awards.#netgalley#harpercollins,

This book was so thoughtful. The back and forth of good and evil, right and wrong was compelling. The way the storyline wove these themes throughout really made the reader ponder exactly whose house was paying, and what price? Expertly done.