Perry's Reviews > The Orphan Master's Son

Don't Give Up, You're Not Beaten Yet

After buying this book, I read 75 pages and gave up, thinking it was too dark and foreign for me to like. Some time after the novel won the Pulitzer Price in Fiction for 2013, I decided to start over and nearly gave up again around the same point, but decided to keep reading to page 100. Somewhere around page 85, I was intrigued, and by page 100, I could not put the book down.

Now, I cannot laud The Orphan Master's Son highly enough to do it justice. Its excellent development of characters and subtext perfectly place the reader in another world, within a fantastic story that seemed so real. The seemingly authentic representation of North Korean life and the dictatorship made the book all the more profound and effective. Prior to reading it for example, I'd read news that Kim Jong Un had 9 orchestra members executed to squash rumors that his wife, a singer, was "friendly" prior to marrying him.

A quote I found particularly profound relating to life in North Korea:

“I wonder of what you must daily endure in America, having no government to protect you, no one to tell you what to do. Is it true you're given no ration card, that you must find food for yourself? Is it true that you labor for no higher purpose than paper money? What is California, this place you come from? I have never seen a picture. What plays over the American loudspeakers, when is your curfew, what is taught at your child-rearing collectives? Where does a woman go with her children on Sunday afternoons, and if a woman loses her husband, how does she know the government will assign her a good replacement? With whom would she curry favor to ensure her children got the best Youth Troop leader?”

This novel has it all--adventure, suspense, a great literary structure and even some romance:

“They’re [poems] about a woman whose beauty is like a rare flower. There is a man who has a great love for her, a love he’s been saving up for his entire life, and it doesn’t matter that he must make a great journey to her, and it doesn’t matter if their time together is brief, that afterward he might lose her, for she is the flower of his heart and nothing will keep him from her.”

I loved this novel, which I consider the best I've read this decade.

Perseverance pays.