So uh, first of all: wow?

This book follows six people with wildly different lives and statuses for about ten years in North Korea as they are swept by the famine that hit the country in the mid 90s. A loyal-to-the-regime married woman with kids, her rebellious daughter, a homeless boy, a pediatrician and two teenagers who start a tentative romance in a small village.

I'm terrible at putting my thoughts into words, so let me just say that whenever I talk to anyone about North Korea, unerrigly they say "the only good thing is that they don't even know how bad they have it", which, fair enough, it's partially true since they live in what seems to be a hermetically sealed country; but I had always suspected they must know something. Few things are as hard to kill as human curiosity.

And this book, well, it proves it. By eavesdropping, illegal radio and television, picking up small details from propaganda posters and trading illegal books on capitalist economy, people start to question things. Reality is never as homogeneous as it seems from afar.

This is not a fiction book so it's hard to review it. I can't rate the horrifying events reported in it as I would a story. Is it good? Is it bad? It's horrible and harsh, but also at times, surprisingly delicate. It's real.

The only question that should matter is: Should you read it? And that is a resounding YES.