Synopses & Reviews
Best friends b and Rang are all each other have.
Their parents are absent, their teachers avert their eyes when they walk
by. Everyone else in town acts like they live in Seoul even though it's
painfully obvious they don't. When Rang begins to be bullied horribly
by the boys in baseball hats, b fends them off. But one day Rang
unintentionally tells the whole class about b's dying sister and how her
family is poor, and each of them finds herself desperately alone. The
only place they can reclaim themselves, and perhaps each other, is
beyond the part of town where lunatics live — the End.
In a piercing, heartbreaking, and astonishingly honest voice, Kim Sagwa's b, Book, and Me walks the precipice between youth and adulthood, reminding us how perilous the edge can be.
Review
"At turns raw and piercing,
dreamy and surreal, Kim's latest import...is a pressing indictment of
today's too-often onerous transition toward uncertain adulthood." Booklist (Starred Review)
Review
"...broken into
short, sometimes-dreamlike sections that capture [the characters']
teenage angst and moods....A dark, dystopian view of South Korean
adolescence, hopelessness, and the cruelties children are capable of
inflicting on each other." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Surreal and luminous." Foreword Reviews
Review
"A haunting and complex
portrayal of teenage angst in today's modern society....Kim skillfully
probes the relationship between the dangerous and existential angst of
adolescents and the pressures of trying to survive in a
globalist-capitalist world." Korean Literature Now
About the Author
Kim Sagwa is one of South
Korea's most acclaimed young writers. She is the author of several
novels, story collections, and works of nonfiction, and has been
shortlisted for several major South Korean awards, including the Munji
Prize and the Young Writers Award. Kim contributes columns to two major
Seoul newspapers, and she co-translated John Freeman's book
How to Read a Novelist into Korean. She lives in New York City.
Based in Seoul, Sunhee Jeong
is a Korean-English translator and editor of literary and multimedia
productions. She is also a scholar of visual studies, intersectionality
and critical theory.