Mina

August 20, 2018
Kim’s English-language debut shines a light on the unique pressures faced by Korean teenagers, and the darker sides of adolescent rage. Outwardly, Crystal seems like an average teen: clever, beautiful, and confident, she studies hard for cram school, goes to karaoke, and has a rotating cast of boyfriends she discards with ease. Her best friend is the titular Mina, whose older brother, Minho, is the boy Crystal has a crush on, and with whom Crystal has a refreshingly realistic and caustic relationship. But when Pak Chiye, a girl from their high school and Mina’s childhood friend, kills herself by jumping from the roof of their school building, Mina is greatly affected, withdrawing from school and growing depressed. For Crystal, this serves as something of a trigger, with her behavior becoming increasingly more erratic as she must reconcile her own sense of self with the pressures placed on young people by a society where “reward means suffering and suffering means reward.” This escalates into random acts of violence, which stand out from the dialogue- and detail-heavy novel as particularly chilling and heartbreaking. As a writer, Kim is wordy and specific, sometimes too concerned with the minutiae of an interaction and drawing attention away from the story at large. But as a cartographer and guide of the teenage experience, she is an expert, crafting an unsettling, deeply felt, and ultimately devastating depiction of the turmoil of youth.

August 1, 2018
Kim's English debut is a descent into the dark world of a teenage girl.Crystal lives in P City, South Korea, where she attends high school, cram school, and extra tutoring. Her life, full of intense academic pressure and economic privilege, is devoid of much adult oversight. We meet her in a living room with her best friend, Mina, and Mina's brother, Minho. They listen to Kim Gordon, order pizza, and, as "a game, a joke," Crystal begins to strangle Mina, leaving marks on her neck. In some ways, Crystal comes across as a typical, confused teen. She has a boyfriend who she thinks may be immature. She's a good student who feels she may merely tell adults what they want to hear. But she has a warped and widely vacillating self-image: "She is perfect because she is unfeeling and doesn't know love." Still, Crystal may not be unique in her numbed, fragile mental state. Suicides are common among her peers, and a classmate's suicide ruptures Mina and Crystal's friendship. Throughout the novel, teen dialogue is rendered realistically, perhaps to a fault; it is nearly impossible to distinguish the voices of friends who come to sound so much alike. As Crystal slips further into delusions, pagelong paragraphs pull us deep into her mind, an uncomfortable, claustrophobic place to be. "There are too many people who ought to be killed," Crystal writes in an assignment and then deletes. Kim's prose is focused, sharp, and unflinching, even--and especially--in the novel's gruesome scenes. We see the color of blood mixed with milk, for instance. It is "the color of strawberries." The novel is full of such vivid details, difficult to read and more difficult to forget.A startling, disturbing portrait of teenage friendship.

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Starred review from September 1, 2018
Crystal works hard to earn top grades at her cram school and maintain her image as an excellent citizen while smoking, drinking, and dating different boys in her nonstudy hours. But whatever she achieves never seems to be enough, and she's in a constant frenzy to fill her time and be the best at everything?failure is never an option. Her only friend, Mina, doesn't understand Crystal's increasingly erratic nature. Their attempts at talking about their deep personal issues only end up in bickering. Mina's brother and Crystal's crush, Minho, is equally unresponsive to Crystal's emotional outbursts. He merely accepts what life hands to him and doesn't question things that are outside of the status quo. As Crystal bottles up more of her rage, it exudes in violence that slowly escalates until it explodes in a devastating conclusion. Award-winning Korean author Kim's first novel to be translated into English is a powerful portrayal of teenage angst, confusion, and the surmounting pressures on Korean teens to achieve. Her poignant and very detailed exploration of the complex and unstable emotions of adolescence will keep readers rapt until the end.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)