Almond

March 1, 2020
A Korean teenager struggles with a rare emotional impairment. Soon Yunjae, a highly intelligent teenage boy who lives with his mother and grandmother in Seoul, suffers from alexithymia, a defect believed to be rooted in the amygdala--the almond-shaped region of the brain--that renders him incapable of expressing, or even identifying, his emotions. Yunjae's antagonist, nicknamed Gon, has returned to his home after 13 years following a mysterious disappearance that saw him shunted among various foster homes and finally to a youth shelter. In that long exile, he's become a hardened juvenile delinquent, bitter toward the father he believes abandoned him and acting out at every opportunity. When Yunjae becomes the victim of an act of random violence that shatters his life and thrusts him into an unwanted state of independence, Gon, sensing his classmate's vulnerability, singles him out for special torment. The radical imbalance between Gon's physical and emotional abuse and Yunjae's inability to respond in any meaningful way fuels the novel's escalating tension and justifies Yunjae's blunt description of his story as one "about a monster meeting another monster." But that imbalance subtly shifts as the two damaged boys inch toward something that looks like a friendship and becomes more complicated when a young girl named Dora enters the picture. In her debut novel, director and screenwriter Sohn makes the bold decision to choose an emotionally constricted first-person narrator, but the risk pays off. With the aid of a skillful translation, she conveys the hollowed-out feeling of Yunjae's life and his almost inexpressible desire to overcome it, heightened by the contrast with Gon's inability to control his rage. The novel will appeal fully to adults, but mature young readers who must cope in their everyday lives with the struggles of late adolescence will find themselves identifying with Yunjae and moved by his plight. A sensitive exploration of what it's like to live at life's emotional poles.

COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

April 1, 2020

Debut Award-winning South Korean screenwriter/director Sohn's intimate and surprising debut novel features Yunjae, born with a condition that limits his ability to experience or even recognize emotion; in his brain, the almond-shaped organs governing feelings are smaller than normal. But this novel is not about disability, instead examining our capacity to connect. Yunjae's mother works tirelessly to teach him how to manage in a world he can't read and reaches out to her own estranged mother, who becomes a sharp-witted, doting grandma. When they are lost in a terrible Christmas eve shooting (it's Yunjae's 16th birthday), he soldiers on, helped by a sympathetic neighbor. At school, his imperturbability stymies the gangsterish Gon, who initially bullies him but then befriends him while inadvertently leading him to a dangerous edge. Will Gon and Yunjae's secret crush, Dora, help Yunjae learn to feel? VERDICT Impressively portraying Yunjae's shrugged-shoulder calm and efforts to understand his world, Sohn offers a heartening study of human emotion.

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from April 15, 2020
Novels featuring neurodiverse protagonists are claiming more space on both adult and children's shelves. The most common underlying message encourages kindness and empathy, despite obvious, sometimes impenetrable, differences. In what might be the first novel to feature a protagonist with alexithymia?an inability to identify and express one's feelings, initially documented in medical journals in the 1970s?Korean screenwriter/director/novelist Sohn's affecting debut arrives stateside, Anglophone-enabled by Lee, who began translating purely out of my enjoyment. Despite shocking violence?gruesome murders, butterfly dismemberment?the adjectives pure and enjoyment do, ironically, truly describe Yunjae's story. Raised by his grandmother and mother who worked diligently to guide him through everyday social interactions, Yunjae at 15 is effectively orphaned: his grandmother is dead, his mother comatose. A guardian-of-sorts who lives above the used bookstore the trio called home, appears to help navigate daily challenges, gently guiding Yunjae through the possibility of new relationships with the bully who's convinced Yunjae usurped the most important moment of his life and the first girl whose attention Yunjae seeks. As Yunjae risks communication and connection, the eponymous almond?the undeveloped amygdalae of his brain that controls emotions?takes seed, and (in accordance with new studies, Sohn adds in her author's notes) gives Yunjae the courage to claim an entirely different story. New and unknown. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)