The hard road out One woman's escape from North Korea

Park is a twice-escaped defector. Chai is initially her hired English translator, then her friend, even sister. "Jihyun is from the North and I am from the South," Chai writes, "but we share a single identity: we're both Korean." At their 2014 first meeting in Manchester, Chai interviews Park in Korean for an Amnesty International documentary. Two years later, perhaps the time "needed for trust to grow," Park asks Chai to write her story. Chai accepts because she "want[s] to give voice to history's invisible people." Polyglot Chai, interestingly, writes in French, which translator Baldwin-Beneich English-enables. Middle-child Park grew up fervently believing in the resilient post-war miracle that was North Korea. But adulthood brought undeniable awareness of the regime's brutality and the widespread starvation. She escaped to China, only to be sold into slavery by her mother and sister. Her harrowing journey eventually brought her to safety in England. Chai attentively ciphers Park's survival, intertwining her own soul-awakening empathy for their Korean history and heritage. Any literary shortcomings are overshadowed by the gravity of Park's testimony; caring audiences won't turn away.

A North Korean refugee describes her harrowing escape from a dictatorship amid a devastating famine. When Jihyun Park was a young girl, her parents sent her to live with her grandmother, whom she didn't know well but soon grew to love. After her grandmother's death, Jihyun moved back to the family's apartment in Ranam. While she was well fed at her grandmother's house, in Ranam, she returned to what would become a lifelong struggle with hunger. Despite the tortuous "self-criticism sessions" and mandatory agricultural service, the author enjoyed school and was invited to take a prestigious entrance exam that would allow her to join the Corps of Young Pioneers, a government-run socialist youth group. Unfortunately, Jihyun's maternal grandfather's defection to South Korea years before stymied her ability to attend Pyongyang University. "I'd ranked third in the national university entrance exam," writes the author, "but clearly that wasn't enough for Pyongyang University--at least not for someone of my social rank." Thanks to her mother's ingenuity, Jihyun secured a position as a mathematics teacher in Chongjin in the early years of a decadelong famine spurred by the collapse of the Soviet Union, "a country on which North Korea had become highly dependent for crop production." The threat of starvation forced the author to escape to China with her siblings, a decision that would lead to a betrayal that threatened to break her spirit. The brave, tender, and intimate narrative provides a frank and balanced view of the reality of life under a dictatorship. Particularly impressive is the author's transparency about her difficulties overcoming her own "brainwashing" even when faced with harsh realities. The translator includes several unnecessarily disruptive chapters in her own voice that snap readers out of the story ("As Jihyun tells me about her life…I take on her perspective, I access her inner world. I become her"), marring an otherwise well-structured book. An honest, human portrayal of the brutality of life in North Korea. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.