“I am in such despair that everything looks like a noose. But then I remember that I cannot leave, or you will have no home to return to. And so I stay.”
Eve J. Chung’s The Young Will Remember (Berkley 2026) is a captivating historical fiction novel that takes a deep dive into the humanity on both sides of a war and motherhood, echoing with the resounding truth that we are far more alike than we will ever be different. The novel is well written, with sections broken up by letters and telegrams about the ongoing conflict, and it keeps a nice pace. And the plot is just… I loved it.
Ellie Chang is a Chinese American journalist covering the Korean war. She doesn’t speak Korean, but she speaks Mandarin and Japanese, which she uses to advance her career. While on a military flight, her plane is shot down over North Korea. Enemy soldiers surround the plane when a woman starts screaming in Korean. It’s a case of mistaken identity – grief has convinced the woman that Ellie is her daughter who had been taken by the Japanese years earlier. In the confusion, the soldiers let her go with the woman. Once it becomes clear she’s not the woman’s daughter, they forge a friendship; Ellie will help her look for her daughter, and she will help Ellie get back to the Americans and safety. Meanwhile, a war continues to rage around them and Ellie is very much in enemy territory. But how are these people her enemies?
Chung does not gloss over the horrors of war or of the previous Japanese occupation and the stolen girls who were forced into sexual slavery as “comfort women.” The geopolitical aspects of this novel are so well done within the captivating historical framework. I read a review that said the novel is “Kristin Hannah meets Pachinko.” It’s an unpopular opinion to say I don’t care for Kristin Hannah because I think she writes trauma porn, so I won’t make the comparison here. I did love Pachinko though. Th Young Will Remember is fantastic historical fiction that doesn’t rely on trauma for trauma’s sake.
Read this book.
A Girl Named Tommi 