Star of the North

March 15, 2018
A dozen years after her 18-year-old identical twin sister disappeared from a beach on South Korea's Baengnyeong Island, just west of North Korea, Georgetown geopolitics professor Jenna Williams risks her life to find her.The year is 2010. Jenna, whose mother is Korean and father African-American, has been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder after the apparent drowning of her sibling, who had been preparing to spend a gap year studying music in Seoul. Jenna's efforts to lose herself in her work are upended by a Japanese woman in the news who claims her long-missing teenage son was one of many young foreign nationals abducted from beaches and taken to North Korea by submarine. Recruited by the CIA, Jenna undergoes intensive training and enters North Korea on a supposed peace mission. Danger awaits. Meanwhile, newly promoted North Korean Col. Cho is sent to the United States to negotiate with the evil West after the state eliminates his predecessor--a fate Cho gravely fears awaits him if his blood ties to a traitor are revealed. And a woman from a farm collective, Mrs. Moon, sets herself up as a black marketeer after selling goods from a South Korean aid balloon and learning such tricks of the trade as bribery. Welsh novelist John (Flight from Berlin, 2009), who visited North Korea in 2012, offers an informed look at the oppression, corruption, and widespread suffering under Kim Jong-il, father of Kim Jong-un. But as entertaining as the converging plots can be, the book is too lightweight to be taken as seriously as it wants. And the author is a bit too understanding of the murderous Kim and his need to launch rockets.A sometimes-suspenseful but never gripping novel about North Korea circa 2010.

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Starred review from March 26, 2018
This outstanding thriller from John (Flight from Berlin) brings to life the seldom-seen underbelly of North Korea, which the author visited in 2012. In 2010, Jenna (born Jee-min), an academic at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., joins the CIA in part to find her twin sister, Soo-min, whom North Korean commandos abducted off a South Korean island in 1998. Meanwhile, Cho Sang-ho, a lieutenant colonel in North Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs who knows about Pyongyang’s kidnapping program (and many of the country’s other dark episodes), travels on a diplomatic mission to New York. There, at a reception at the 21 Club, he meets Jenna, who tells him about Soo-min. Cho is initially unhelpful, but in the end he agrees to assist Jenna in her quest to locate her sister. As an undercover CIA agent, Jenna goes to North Korea, where she poses as a translator for a U.N. peace mission while engaging in a dangerous search for her sister. John excels at drawing the everyday details of life in a closed society—the drug use of the lower classes, the paranoia and fear of those who have gained access to the upper ranks, the omnipotence of the Bowibu, the state security force. Those seeking a realistic, highly readable look at North Korea will be richly rewarded. Agent: Daniel Lazar, Writers House.

April 1, 2018

John (Flight from Berlin) weaves a twisty tale about North Korea, the most secretive country on Earth. Readers follow three characters: Jenna, a CIA agent whose twin was abducted while on vacation in South Korea; Mrs. Moon, a North Korean peasant who enters the black market, hoping to make a better life for herself and her husband, with goods illegally obtained from an international aid balloon; and the high-ranking Colonel Cho, who learns about a career-destroying family secret that could mean death for him. From the luxuries of power to the back-door political dealings to the torturous realities of a concentration camp, these three seemingly disparate plots are deftly woven, leading to an ending that is at once breathtaking and bittersweet. VERDICT Conceived on the author's 2012 trip to North Korea, this well-researched, fast-paced, and pertinent thriller will keep readers' attention from start to finish. Readers of all sorts--whether spy fiction fans, thriller aficionados, or book junkies looking for a fantastic read--will enjoy.--Laura Hiatt, Fort Collins, CO

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Starred review from May 1, 2018
Welsh author John uses three memorable primary characters to tell a remarkable story about the most opaque country on Earth: North Korea. Set largely in the final years of Kim Jong Il's reign as the country's Dear Leader, circa 2010-11, this tale will resonate with any reader unnerved by the threat of nuclear war or by President Trump's intemperate threats and name-calling. Jenna Williams?half African American, half South Korean?is a Georgetown professor. She is haunted by her twin sister's disappearance years before from a South Korean beach; when the CIA recruits her, she accepts the assignment. Colonel Cho, a North Korean diplomat whose successful negotiations with the Americans have made him a rising star in the government, is worried about undergoing a deep background check by the feared state security agency; Cho, who never knew his birth parents, fears that he might be found to have bad blood. Mrs. Moon is an aged, arthritic peasant in far North Korea who finds a balloon containing South Korean Choco Pies; she sells the pies and becomes an entrepreneur. The lives of these people collide in a harrowing thriller that exposes an amazingly corrupt regime that embraces savage brutality and nearly every kind of lucrative criminal enterprise. John concludes with a fascinating 10-page bibliographic essay supporting his claims, but Star of the North would be a superior thriller even if it was pure fiction.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)