Kim’s style oscillates between the high/low requirements of her characters: the prose can be omniscient and baroque, offering a drone’s eye view over the highborn, and street-level plain when it comes to urchins ... No ink is wasted on the mundane travails of the average citizen. Everyone is extraordinary, a singular beast in exceptional times, and in Kim’s capable hands this liberty pays off. The plot sweeps us along ... Kim’s choice to bypass the Korean War feels canny and confident, as if to remind us that this is not a history lesson ... Beasts of a Little Land is a stunning achievement. Juhea Kim wrestles with the chaos of a half-century of love, idealism, war and violence, and does so with courage and wisdom.

... [a] beautiful book ... The writing has a dreamlike quality that immerses the reader in a fascinating world ... Not only is this a gorgeously written story, but Kim also gives us insight into a historical period with which many Westerners will be unfamiliar. The casual cruelty of the Japanese military, as they allow the Korean peasants to starve, and the indifference of the Americans and Europeans to their plight, provide a justifiable rationale for some Koreans, including JungHo, to turn to communism and the Soviet Union for help in achieving justice. The tiger—an elusive, majestic creature—is a fitting symbol for these courageous people as they face their doom.

If Juhea Kim’s Beasts of a Little Land were filmed, you’d want to see it in theaters, with a giant screen and a sweeping soundtrack. Military campaigns, anti-capitalist gatherings, orphan girls groomed into world-famous courtesans, street rats rising to glory, all against the backdrop of Korea’s tumultuous 20th century – the cast grows large and the storyline reaches far ... You wouldn’t know from reading it that Beasts of a Little Land is Kim’s debut novel. There is no shortage of ambition on display here, and fleet-footed narrative pacing to match it ... Kim drops her characters into interesting scenes but often leaves them inert, as if we’re watching a filmstrip. The narrative describes their internal states at length, but action feels muddy and distant. The effect is that the book can feel like it’s written in synopsis, that we’re getting the digested version of the characters’ raw experience ... Still, this is a book written with warmth, wisdom, and an inherent sense for the dramatic. Readers who take to its style will gladly follow the tangled lives of its charismatic cast.

... accomplished ... One of Kim's core strengths is casting 20th-century Korea's civic and social history as vital while never losing sight of her characters' emotions. As the paths of her characters twist and cross, albeit with far too many coincidences, and their fortunes rise and fall, she keeps the weight of the personal and political in perfect balance. Beasts of a Little Land is epic in range but intimate in emotional depth, sure to appeal to readers of historical fiction who prize a well-wrought character.

This ambitious debut novel by Portland, Ore., writer Juhea Kim provides a kaleidoscopic view of Korean history from 1917 to 1965 ... Kim’s exhaustive research and expansive cast represent the novel’s strengths and flaws. There are too many characters, too much historical detail and not enough attention to language and storytelling. Beasts relies on easy coincidences and informational passages. The book is marred by harlequin phrasing and a sentimental ending. Even so, it’s being released with a major media campaign. Debut writers would be better served with attentive editing and mentoring that focuses less on marketability and more on literary quality. Juhea Kim is as intelligent and intrepid as Jade, definitely a writer to watch for as she reaches her literary promise.

Fittingly (perhaps too much so) for a novel about a divided country, Beasts of a Little Land brims with oppositional pairs. In rough order of appearance: Hunter versus tiger, Korea versus Japan, rich versus poor, parents versus children, man versus woman, sister versus sister, capitalist versus communist, mother versus courtesan … and so on. It’s a great deal to process, let alone rank. Suffice it to say that Korea contains many of these dualities and paradoxes—though, unfortunately, Kim can’t always hold her fictional tiger by its tail ... there is something jarring in the more personal stories. Kim’s sheen of romance, sentimentality and even a strangely dissonant nostalgia (given the subject matter) might be attributed to the secondhand nature of these anecdotes, at least as the relatively young author might have heard or read them ... Adding to the sense of unreality is the utter lack, in a book teeming with underworld activity, of any courtesans catering to (or anyone having) preferences other than the heterosexual. Yet that is a small quibble next to the strangest omission in the book—its jump from 1945, when the Japanese emperor surrendered to the Allies to end WWII and Korea declared its independence, to 1964, when the lives of several characters finally end. What happened to the brutal war that resulted in Korea’s schism? ... Should she take on the thornier moments of history—Korean or otherwise—the author would do best to push past shimmering symbols and easy archetypes into a reality far messier than we might prefer it to be.

[A] captivating debut novel from Juhea Kim, an epic of love and war spanning decades that the author somehow smuggles into a brisk, 400-page book ... As with any great love story, their relationship repeatedly sparks to life only to be frustrated by events both mundane and historically consequential. The times the characters must survive are often violent and harsh, but they maintain a surprising tenderheartedness ... Readers should expect to be swept along themselves by the waves of passion and tragedy that make the novel so appealing.

[A] vast, ambitious saga spanning generations and geographies ... though it unfolds against this historical backdrop, Beasts of a Little Land is as much a story of love—requited, unrequited, imperfect, fleeting, dogged, romantic, platonic, familial—and the knocks of time on our bodies and spirits as it is about a moment for one country struggling against colonialism. In Kim’s deft hands, it becomes an epic tale of human connection over a lifetime and a lyrical portrait of the land they all call home.

Kim’s debut novel wondrously reveals broken families and surprising alliances created by uncontrollable circumstances ... Beyond her literary prowess, Korean-born, Princeton-educated polyglot Kim further showcases her other passions as artist and sustainability activist, interweaving the history of Korea’s decimated tiger population as well as traditional singing, dancing, and even filmmaking ... Richly alluring and significant.

Kim’s dreamy, intense debut is both a sure-footed historical account of the Korean struggle for independence from Japan and the emotionally fraught story of several people whose lives are inextricably tied together ... While the members of the Japanese military often verge on being caricatures of villains, and some readers may balk at the novel’s coincidences, the prose is ravishing and Kim demonstrates remarkable control of a complicated narrative. Even those with little knowledge of Korean history will come away struck by the way individuals shape and are shaped by the political and cultural changes of the first half of the 20th century. The author’s off to a strong start.

An epic novel brings complex 20th-century Korean history to life ... In this extraordinary historical novel, debut author Kim weaves together the story of friends and rivals trying to survive and thrive from the era of the Japanese occupation of Korea to the political purges of the mid-20th century ... Gorgeous prose and unforgettable characters combine to make a literary masterpiece.