Once Upon a K-Prom is a spin on the “ordinary girl meets famous boy” YA story, incorporating the recent global success of K-Pop. Elena Soo’s childhood best friend Robbie Choi moved home to Korea when they were both ten. While Elena feels adrift, without anything to make her special, Robbie became a K-Pop idol. And…
Seoulmates is the conclusion to the story begun in Heart and Seoul. I strongly recommend reading the books in order, since events in this volume build upon what happened in the first novel. When Hara travelled to Seoul, it was with the sole intent of finding her birth mother. As a Korean adoptee, she had…
Skye is, at size 16, an average American girl – but much larger than the average Korean (something her mother will never let her forget) and downright gargantuan in the world of K-pop. Skye, however, won’t let other people’s beauty standards hold her back. Knowing she can dance and sing, she enters a K-pop talent…
One of the greatest gifts of These Times to me has been my discovery of how much I love K-Pop. Short for “Korean Pop Music”, it’s a behemoth industry that I am many years late to the party on, but ever so grateful to be here. The boyband BTS is the major name in this…
“I go to work thinking of death” begins Ji-min Lee’s The Starlet and the Spy a sentence that sets the pace for a very readable historical novel that takes a wholly different but understandably downbeat look at Marilyn Monroe’s iconic 1954 visit to troops serving in the Korean War. From its planning stages to Monroe’s…
Lisa See – novelist of well-researched and sometimes amazing, sometimes infuriating novels like Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, China Girls, Dreams of Joy and Shanghai Girls – returns with The Island of Sea Women, a beautiful and heartbreaking tale about two lifelong friends who become part of the legendary all-female diving collective known as…
Set during the Korean War and the years beyond it, Crystal Hana Kim’s If You Leave Me explores both the split between duty and romantic desire and the way choices can echo through the generations for years to come. Lee Haemi is a sixteen year old refugee from South Korea living in a camp by…
The Story of Life on the Golden Fields manhwa, or Korean graphic novel, trilogy transports you to pre-modern Korea for two lyrical, sensual love stories. In the first book, The Color of Earth , a young girl named Ehwa grows from child to young teen and experiences her first crushes, and her unnamed mother falls…