Q&A with Sung J. Woo

From my Q&A with Sung J. Woo, author of Skin Deep:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

The working title of this book was Shadows Deep. I still reference it in the epigraph:

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep

It’s from W.B. Yeats’s poem, “When You Are Old,” which highlights the aging of beauty (among many other things). The central theme of my book is the concept of beauty and the disturbing lengths some people will go to attain it. Early on, private detective Siobhan O’Brien discovers that the college where a female student went missing has curiously admitted an overwhelming number of attractive young women for its freshman class. Now led by an ex-runway fashion model, Llewellyn College has not only gone co-ed for the first time in its two-hundred-year history, but it seems possible that its president may have even stranger plans for her school.

I was given...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Sung J. Woo's website.

The Page 69 Test: Everything Asian.

My Book, The Movie: Skin Deep.

Q&A with Sung J. Woo.

--Marshal Zeringue