To survive, Sungju creates a gang and lives by thieving, fighting, begging, and stealing rides on cargo trains. I liked how Sungju included Korean words that he didn’t know the meaning of as a child so you, as the reader, experienced the same type of confusion he had experienced.Every Falling Star, the first book to portray contemporary North Korea to a young audience, is the intense memoir of a North Korean boy named Sungju who was forced at age twelve to live on the streets and fend for himself. There are not pages upon pages of fact-listing that would take away from the story, and the memoir is easy to read. I found this book particularly interesting because it’s written for young adult readers. With children dropping out of school to help their families scavenge for food and people dying of hunger left and right, Sungju discovered a whole new side of North Korea. All the people mourned the loss of their leader, a person whom they looked up to and pictured as a god.Īround the same time, Sungju’s father lost his ranking as a military officer and relocated their family to a poor town called Gyeong-song. His world came crashing down when Kim Il-sung, the leader of North Korea, died. He thought and believed with his entire heart that North Korea was the best country in the entire world. At the time, Sungju’s father was a military officer, and Sungju grew up believing he would be one, too. His childhood was not unlike most Americans’ childhoods he went to school, he played with toys and he took care of his dog. Sungju grew up in the city of Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea. Once I read and processed the complete title of the book, I knew it needed to be reviewed so that people could learn from Sungju Lee’s horrific experiences and understand what North Korea is like from a citizen’s point of view. (At the time, I didn’t even take notice of the black barbed wire fence across the image.)
When I spotted “Every Falling Star: The True Story of How I Survived and Escaped North Korea” lying on the front table at a Voices meeting, waiting to be the possible subject of a book review, my eyes were drawn to the pretty sunset on the cover.
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