An insightful, moving tale of one family’s struggle to survive the Korean War and its aftermath.
Choi, in her debut novel, offers a sobering glimpse into life on both sides of the Korean Demilitarized Zone.
The author draws on her own experiences growing up during the Korean War in this fictionalized account. Choi, like the fictional Lee family, lived near Communist leader Kim Il-Sung’s birthplace in North Korea until her family fled south. The story opens in the Lees’ new home outside of Seoul, where Mr. Lee works as a successful factory manager and he and his wife raise their four children: lovely, serious Gina; active, funny Sonia; inquisitive Mia; and Hahn-kook, the beloved male baby. Much of the story is told from Mia’s perspective; in Incheon, she learns that her father was persecuted for being a communist, and in Seoul, she and her family face starvation and persecution as suspected “Reds.” Little by little, the family breaks apart, first when their father disappears, then when Gina and Sonia defect to the north to live under communism. Mia later chooses to enter an orphanage, disgusted that her mother would rather provide for Hahn-kook’s education instead of Mia’s. Eventually, Mia moves to the United States, becomes a well-respected pediatrician and later takes a shocking voyage back to North Korea to reunite with her sisters. She finds that Gina has risen through the Communist Party ranks with her husband, yet they find themselves disillusioned with the regime, and Sonia’s crushing poverty breaks Mia’s heart. The story doesn’t unfold straightforwardly, instead alternating between Mia as an 11-year-old, Mia as a middle-aged woman, Gina in 1950s North Korea and more recent events. The narrative shifts, especially between Mia’s first-person accounts and the oddly interspersed third-person chapters, distract from Choi’s engaging portraits of midcentury North and South Korea. The novel’s conclusion resorts to unrealistic coincidences in order to provide an uplifting ending, but after all the suffering experienced by the Lees, readers may welcome a bit of fairy-tale happiness.
An insightful, moving tale of one family’s struggle to survive the Korean War and its aftermath.Pub Date: Dec. 14, 2012
ISBN: 978-1478321415
Page Count: 344
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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