A charming but unfocused book with great potential, though the writing doesn’t always rise to the occasion.
This short novel by first-time author Oh centers on Soon Hi Kim, a 13-year-old girl from a Korean farming village who escapes after being kidnapped and sent to a Japanese army base to be used as a “comfort girl” for World War II soldiers.
Independent of its plot, much of this book is written almost like an essay, explaining the origins of prostitution in the Japanese military and how the comfort girls were kidnapped and collected. There are also several frank descriptions of the soldiers’ brutality, both to each other and to their sex slaves. Then Soon, along with Sook, a friend and fellow comfort girl, paint themselves green, dodge spotlights, crawl under a fence and escape. Soon makes her way to a train headed back to her home, where she meets a Korean man named David, “a handsome boy of pre-marriage age” going to visit his parents in Seoul. They fall in love, and much of the rest of the book is devoted to the ins and outs of preparations for their wedding, while memories of her slavery linger over Soon and complicate her emotions. Unfortunately, the surprising, abrupt change in the plot doesn’t serve the story well. The same essaylike style continues, which works fine for the story’s first half but seems incongruous once the book turns into a romance. In the horrifying yet beautiful story, the characters are believably complex, but the prose falters from time to time. The sentences can be clunky and often confusing, making the otherwise solid story difficult to enjoy. Since the story lacks many discrete scenes, instead opting for general descriptions, it’s not consistently engaging or easy to follow.
A charming but unfocused book with great potential, though the writing doesn’t always rise to the occasion.Pub Date: Jan. 29, 2013
ISBN: 978-1479226207
Page Count: 154
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 10, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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