Mina

by Kim Sagwa, Fulton Bruce and Ju-Chan (Translator)

Overview

“Kim Sagwa is South Korea’s young, brilliant, fearless writer.” — Don Mee Choi, author of Hardly War
“She doesn’t know what to do, and that amounts to a state of torture.”
Crystal toils day and night to earn top grades at her cram school. She’s also endlessly texting, shopping, drinking, vexing her boyfriends, cranking up her mp3s, and fantasizing about her next slice of cheesecake. Her non- stop frenzy never quite manages the one thing that might calm her down: opening up about the pressures that are driving her to the edge. She certainly hasn’t talked with her best friend, Mina, nor Mina’s brother, whom she’s developing a serious crush on. And Crystal’s starting to lose her grip.
In this shocking English debut, award-winning Korean author Kim Sagwa delivers an astonishingly complex portrait of modern-day adolescence. With pitch-perfect dialogue and a precise eye for detail, Kim creates a piercingly real teen protagonist—at once powerful, vulnerable, and utterly confused. As one bad decision leads to another, this promising life spirals to a devastating climax.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781931883757
Publisher:	Two Lines Press
Publication date:	10/08/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	969,491
File size:	1 MB
Age Range:	17 Years

About the Author

Kim Sagwa is one of South Korea’s most acclaimed emerging writers. She is the author of several novels, story collections, and works of nonfiction, and has been shortlisted for numerous literary awards. Bruce Fulton and Ju-Chan Fulton have translated dozens of books together since 1985. They have received awards and fellowships including from the National Endowment of the Arts.

Editorial Reviews

08/20/2018
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. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"Award-winning Korean author Kim’s first novel to be translated into English is a powerful portrayal of teenage angst. . . . [It] will keep readers rapt until the end." — Booklist (starred review)

“Shocking and powerful…Kim captures all that’s complicated about adolescence in Mina but goes further, portraying a disaffected generation cracking under the pressures of perfection and the drive for success in a time that could only be our own.” —Book Riot

"[Kim] is an expert, crafting an unsettling, deeply felt, and ultimately devastating depiction of the turmoil of youth." — Publishers Weekly

"The novel is full of such vivid details, difficult to read and more difficult to forget. . . . A startling, disturbing portrait of teenage friendship." — Kirkus

“Kim Sagwa is South Korea’s young, brilliant, fearless writer. In Mina, Kim has created a frenzied language of three teenagers—Mina, Minho, and Crystal—living in ‘P City,’ which in Korean sounds the same as ‘Blood City.’ Beneath the immaculately manicured middle-class affluence, chandelier glitter, free-market economy, and Western cultural hegemony runs the blood of Korea’s dictatorial conformity and historical fratricide. The trio are hollow teenagers in the age of globalization—they mirror one another, reflecting, deflecting, and signaling their helplessness and hatred for the world that has created them. Mina is a story of ‘abjection,’ to borrow Kristeva’s term—a state in which ‘meaning collapses.’ Mina leads us to a place where mirrors of the self and world fold, collapse, shatter, and bleed to death. Mina is one of Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton’s finest translations.” —Don Mee Choi, author of Hardly War

“Mina gets to the core of Korean teenagers. Kim Sagwa’s fragmented rhetoric stands for a generation that has no choice but to set imitation as its standard. The novel, which points out a universal desire for unattainable genuineness, focuses on teenagers while at the same time shining light on Korean society at large. Readers open their eyes wide to the agonizing violence of a character torn up by the inability to bear self-deception.” —Han Yujoo, author of The Impossible Fairy Tale

From the Publisher