Audiobook9 hours
Every Falling Star: The True Story of How I Survived and Escaped North Korea
Written by Sungju Lee and Susan McClelland
Narrated by David Shih
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5/5
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About this audiobook
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 is forced at age twelve to live on the streets and fend for himself. To survive, Sungju creates a gang and lives by thieving, fighting, begging, and stealing rides on cargo trains. Sungju richly re-creates his scabrous story, depicting what it was like for a boy alone to create a new family with his gang, his "brothers"; to be hungry and to fear arrest, imprisonment, and even execution. This riveting memoir allows young listeners to learn about other cultures where freedoms they take for granted do not exist.
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Reviews for Every Falling Star
Rating: 4.254717094339623 out of 5 stars
4.5/5
53 ratings8 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Beautiful and hard story of a boy's life in North Korea. Hard to imagine all the suffering he and a whole country was going through while we lived in comfort. Eye opening.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5very moving, wonderfully told, must read book on north korea
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5What a book! A full experience of what it means to live in NK
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5teen nonfiction (North Korea). Smoothly written biography that reads like a teen dystopian novel (but without the love triangle or epic good/evil battles). Because of this, you sometimes feel that the pace is a bit slow for the first 1/2 of the story, but you can't fault it for that because he's telling a true story, truthfully, and the things he lives through are pretty terrible.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sungju tells the story of growing up in North Korea. His family moves from the capitol city. His parents package this as a vacation, but really his father has been kicked out of the party and punished. It is during the family in the late 1990s. When his parents leave one at a time to get help, Sungju finds himself on his own, organizes a gang, and tries to scrape and survive until he is someone reunited with his parents. It is a meager existence once in which he uses alcohol and drugs to numb the pain and hunger. He and his brothers try to help each other in an increasingly grim reality. It was an eye opener for me. I read this at a tough time with the Covid-19 quarantine happening, and that didn't even begin to tough the suffering I read about in this book. Somehow the author always pointed to people and events that keep hope, even if it wasn't always him.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A great, quick read about the hardships of growing up in North Korea. This first person account really helped bring some of the thoughts I had on North Korea together. The Orphan Master's Son and a NatGeo documentary on NK had given me some pretty good background on what life is like in this veiled country, but the story of SungJu's childhood really drives it home. Does not read at all like a biography, or at least doesn't feel like it. I think it should have mass YA appeal, but would recommend it to anyone in general.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5For anyone who loves a teenage underdog fighting for survival against a dystopian landscape, this guy actually lived it! Love and protection turns into loss turns into resilience turns into hope. Sungju Lee shares the same hope of every fictional dystopian hero: our world can be a better place.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Even though he has escaped North Korea and settled in the U.S. and achieved remarkable success in education, the author still cannot use his real name for fear of retaliation of any family members left behind. Sungju's family lived in the capital city Pyongyang where his father was a respected member of the military under Kim Il-sung. Under Kim Jong-il, however, things changed and the family was forced to move to a city called Gyeong-seong where the parents took jobs doing menial work. Attending school there was a real eye-opener as Sungju's classmates had little or nothing to eat for lunch and most of the education centered on the lives of their country's leaders. When their savings dwindled and work hours were cut, it became imperative the father to go to China to try and make some money (promising to return) and then the mother went to her sister's (promising to return) leaving Sungju alone. Left with nothing but salt to eat, he turned to stealing at the market and eventually creating a gang of kotjebi, street boys. Four and half years later, after living in abysmal conditions, he ran into his grandfather. Soon a broker helps him escape into China where he met his father and they flew to South Korea.This was a stark and honest look at life in this secretive and isolated country. The people are fed a constant supply of lies about their neighbors and the rest of the world to keep them oppressed and accepting of their situation.