Korea, 1917, and on the eve of the Japanese invasion a young girl is sold by her desperate family to a school for courtesans in Pyongyang. She meets and befriends an orphan boy who is living on the streets. For a while, they are inseparable, but as time passes their lives take very different trajectories, with Jade becoming a famous performer and JungHo joining the communist revolutionaries trying to win Korean independence. Though their paths occasionally cross, they know that, along with their innocence, something irrevocable in their friendship has been lost.
Beasts of a Little Land, the debut novel of Korean American writer Juhea Kim, is a magnificent, mesmerizing story of love and war. It questions concepts of right and wrong, friendship and enmity: you can never know who will save you and who will betray you. The country’s struggles for freedom and security are echoed by those of the protagonists. They all, for a variety of reasons, feel caged in by their circumstances; hence the beasts of the title, though a Siberian tiger also has a key role in the plot.
