It’s to Lee’s great credit that we perceive the political world through the personal travails of her three characters: there is nothing heavy-handed or didactic here, just a group of ordinary teenagers living in extraordinary times ... This is a novel of great sincerity and moral courage, a book that can stand as a resonant response to the challenge that fiction has no place in the white heat of political turmoil.
...[a] devastating yet ultimately hopeful novel ... Lee shines a harsh light on the treatment of North Korean immigrants in this foreign world. The result is eye-opening and heartbreaking, even if Danny's story seems a bit far-fetched ... an intense, unforgettable, compassionate study of human resilience.
Lee knows North Korea and gets almost [everything] right, down to exacting details ... Lee has worked with North Korean refugees and she knows intimately their terror when trying to survive in a world where it is impossible to distinguish between friend and foe; where betrayal is a fact of life and people manipulate each other with currencies of sex and religion.
Lee successfully creates well-formed characters and makes readers care about their struggles ... Readers may experience some whiplash as they are pulled from plotline to plotline, but the effect is dramatic and definitely keeps the pages turning ... combines intense and graphic atmospherics with strong narrative threads of romance, friendship, and family values.
Mustering a story writer’s kinetic intensity, the novel seems distracting at first as it switches, chapter by chapter, among the characters, but the spare structure gains strength from their very different voices ... a compelling vision of both North and South Korea.
The plot is full of drama and the writing is crystal clear, with sharply drawn images and evocative word choices while at the same time giving each of three narrators a distinct voice. Still, I found myself just shy of completely absorbed in the story. Between the rotating viewpoint, the ongoing introduction of characters and the continual pausing to look things up in Wikipedia, the book never let me fully relax. This might not be true for better-informed readers, and does not take away from the novel’s message, or the usefulness of giving dopes like me a chance to fill in some of our blanks in geography, history and cultural awareness.
It’s hard for me to believe that Daehan would go through so much physical hardship and emotional suffering alone, as a self-styled orphan, rather than contact either parent again ... Krys Lee inhabits her protagonists in a precise, elegant style that is a consolation for all the misery.
