I didn’t really have much knowledge regarding North Korea and its history before reading this book. Since the country has been so closed off to the rest of the world, it has always been shrouded in some mystery. It’s amazing, actually, how isolated most of the population was/is.

In this book, Barbara Demick follows the lives of six “ordinary” people who she was able to interview extensively. There were times as I was reading where I had to remind myself that these were true life accounts; not fiction. Part of this was due to Demick’s writing, which really brought the plights of these people to life.

The book is 14 years old now and all I can think about is if things are still relatively the same now. I would think that it must be much harder with today’s technology for a country to keep its citizenry in the dark about the rest of the world.

This is a great book for anyone who wants to dip their toes into a little history of North Korea and take a peek behind the curtain as to what life is like.