As an Amazon Associate, Natively earns from qualifying purchases through any Amazon links on the site.
All of our Movie & TV metadata comes from the wonderful project,
The Movie Database. Thank you! While we are permitted to use the TMDB API, we have not been endorsed or certified by TMDB.
Okay choice for first Korean novel
I'm kind of shocked this is considered a kid's book, given the themes and content, but given what I've read of Korean literature in translation, maybe I shouldn't be so surprised. There are some interesting themes about motherhood, discrimination, sacrifice, etc. that definitely don't feel kiddish, and the sometimes-violent conflict between the characters was suspenseful enough to keep me plugging along at a steady pace. It's not something I would have picked up in English, but I think it was a decent choice for my first Korean novel. As far as language goes, the grammar didn't give me too much trouble, but there was a lot of vocabulary that I didn't know. It would have slowed me down way too much to look everything up, so I would say I picked up about 50-60% of the meaning (currently TOPIK 3-4). A lot of it was related to animal anatomy, which probably won't be very useful, but the more general vocab describing the farm and surrounding landscape, plus the emotional descriptors, felt more practical to make note of. Might be interesting to revisit in a year or two and see how much more detail I can pick up.