A very moving and powerful celebration of courage in the face of inhumanity.
In Allen’s riveting short novel, three young people struggle to survive a hellacious North Korean prison camp.
When young North Korean Ra Eun Seo and her friends find a radio that can broadcast stations from the hated South hidden in the forest (where they are foraging for bark and grasses to make thin soup), Seo is entranced. Somehow—there are snitches everywhere—the authorities find out. Seo and her friends, Nari and Min, are sentenced to one of the dreaded reeducation camps. Life in the camps is unbelievably brutal, especially with the sadistic Colonel Nam making Seo the special target of his contempt. (“This time the blow knocked her clean off the chair and she lay, gasping, on the floor. She looked up and saw Nam standing motionless over her. ‘I am a tolerant man, Miss Ra, but you are trying my patience’”). But they have an ally in old Mr. Park and in young Iseul, who is almost feral, born in the camp and destined to die there. Relying on Seo’s spirit and Min’s ingenuity, they plan an escape. Allan is a powerful writer: The details hit on a visceral level, and his characters are memorable creations, including the vicious Col. Nam and, especially, Iseul, who has been made almost sub-human (he may remind readers of Gollum from The Lord of the Rings). He even has his own jargon: Guards are “crushers,” “warmly” means very good, and to “snitch” is to tell (“I help you move the dead-dead, you snitch to me about outside. Warmly trade!”). A miasma of deception, surveillance, and secret agendas permeates the story. The characters are never, ever, safe from prison or execution—Seo’s old teacher, Mr. Chi, a blameless and naive true believer, has no idea why he is being hanged. For days, his body sways in the sleet and cold, a gruesome example. But of what, precisely?
A very moving and powerful celebration of courage in the face of inhumanity.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 173
Publisher: manuscript
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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BOOK REVIEW
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PERSPECTIVES
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