Scissors, Paper, Stone

Winner of the 2016 Quill Prose Award, Scissors, Paper, Stone contemplates the meanings of family through twenty years in the lives of a Korean-American lesbian, her adoptive mother, and her boy-crazy best friend.

What is considered a family, and who gets to define it? In 1964, despite the racial tension occurring in a post–WWIIAmerica, Catherine and Jonathan adopt a baby girl from Korea. This unconventional choice brings disapproval from Catherine’s family, which creates an even closer bond between her and her daughter. Narrated in alternating chapters by Catherine, her adopted daughter Min, and Min’s best friend Laura, Scissors, Paper, Stone spans twenty years of love, loss, and the complex reality of female relationships. By 1985 Catherine is living a risk-free life on her own accord, Laura is dating her way through college, and Min is a massage therapist who has come out as a lesbian and is learning to embrace her Korean heritage. After Min and Laura take a summer road trip together, the shifts in their friendship force all three women to examine the assumptions they’ve been living by and to make choices about the roles they want to play in each other’s lives.