An immersive dramatization of a pivotal moment in South Korea’s history.
In Amos’ novel, a naïve Peace Corps volunteer is swept up in the violent 1980 Gwangju Uprising in South Korea.
Peace Corps volunteer Paul Harkin works in a health center in Mokpo, South Korea. Despite the city’s reputation for being “seedy, provincial, and rebellious,” it’s a place of adventure for Paul that’s completely unlike his dull Indiana hometown. He relishes visiting patients in sketchy neighborhoods, even though his poor language skills often cause mortifying faux pas. When a young teacher named Han Mi Jin calls, he nearly blows her off, assuming she wants English lessons, but she offers to tutor him in Korean. Mi Jin is involved in the student activist movement in nearby Gwangju, protesting the country’s authoritarian president. During their weekly tutoring sessions, she and Paul discuss the political situation and share details of their lives. She tells him that “complacency, is wrong.…This is why my country is falling into ruin. Someday it may ruin your country, too.” She also asserts, “Anger can be a force for good. It’s the motivating force behind people who seek justice.” The South Korean president is assassinated in a military coup, and martial law is declared. There are fears of a potential North Korean attack and talk of evacuating Americans, and Peace Corps volunteers are strictly prohibited from any political involvement. Paul and Mi Jin begin to realize their deeper feelings for each other, but her parents pressure her to marry a local man, and Paul is transferred to Seoul, where he witnesses a demonstration and admires the students’ bravery against riot police and tear gas. As he gets more deeply involved with the Gwangju students, the situation escalates, with violent clashes soon happening between protesters, police, and the army. Paul, Mi Jin, and their friends find themselves at the center of the violence, risking everything.
Amos’ writing is richly detailed, immersing readers in the sights, sounds, and smells of South Korea while illuminating its history and culture. He vividly conveys daily life under a system of casual corruption and cronyism in which the media is censored, citizens are encouraged to spy on their neighbors, and incompetents enjoy privilege while ordinary people barely manage to scrape by. Mi Jin is torn between her old-fashioned family and her forward-looking friends; meanwhile, Paul evolves from passive observer to passionate activist. They and his fellow Peace Corps volunteers Joel and Leslie convincingly change and grow, forging strong bonds of love and friendship as they share harrowing experiences. The novel isn’t preachy; its pointed message about freedom is an intrinsic element of the exciting story. The numerous details slow the narrative’s pace but heighten its impact with blow-by-blow descriptions of violent encounters as courageous people of all ages and backgrounds confront heavily armed soldiers with little more than rocks and sticks, at terrible cost. The author states in the introduction that he is reissuing this “new, expanded edition” of his novel in response to recent events in the United States. An afterword explains that, while harshly repressed, the Gwangju Uprising was the spark that ignited South Korea’s transformation into a democracy over the next several years. The text includes a helpful map and glossary of Korean terms.
An immersive dramatization of a pivotal moment in South Korea’s history.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
