The day has come: I am rating a metafiction book a resounding five stars. I read half of this book over the course of about five months, and the latter half over the course of two days. I sorely wish that I had saved it for a time where I could have read the whole thing consecutively because I feel like there were even more tiny threads and details that I missed because I had forgotten about them. I also really recommend at least having a digital ebook copy from the library even if you are reading this book in another format so that you can easily search for names that you recognize but perhaps forgot the other contexts in which you've seen them. Very helpful!

I learned SO MUCH by reading this book. The history of Korea and the Korean War is something that I only learned a cursory overview about in school, and this was packed with information that I'm going be thinking about for a long time. The book is described as an alternate history, and while that is accurate, it is also meticulously researched and so many of the things that I thought "well that must be part of the fiction?" were actually facts. The twisting layers of this story were so well done and I was screeching as the different pieces of the puzzle got slotted into place by the end. Also this book is so incredibly funny?! It's not the type of funny where I would label it as such in the "moods" on my review, but I laughed out loud *multiple* times while reading this book. I do feel like this is one of those books that I wish I had read in the context of a college class where we could have some discussion about the themes and all the little details, but whew I loved this so much even just reading it alone. I will almost certainly come back to this book someday and read it again.