Rounded up from 4.5 stars. Eye-opening, heartbreaking, compelling, and educational.

Book bingo hua-silo winter 2018: having to do with Asia

I'm judging from that ending that there will be a sequel to Star of the North & I'm overjoyed that there will be. This book was enthralling & thrilling from the very beginning & not a single paragraph was dull. This book will upset you, but it will also teach you & captivate you.

The truth behind this story is haunting, but it comes at a very important point in our history & it's paramount that people start to focus on THIS North Korea, than the funny side of the Kims' behaviour.

D. B. John has clearly done a lot of research & knows about the conditions of North Korea well; helping the people of North Korea is something I'm very passionate about so I felt an overwhelming desire to get my hands on this book as quickly as I could. It did not disappoint.

I was sent a copy of this book by Harvill Secker in return for an honest review.

⚠️ This book contains human suffering, murder, torture, discussions of rape, extreme violence & starvation ⚠️

Extended Review: https://wp.me/p8MbIo-2zf

I would give this 10 stars if I could!!! Highly recommend to ANYONE. North Korea isn’t a place I’ve ever been particularly interested in, but I’ve now created a whole cart on the book depository to read up on it. D.B John has seamlessly merged fact and fiction and produced an unputdownable novel. A book I would read again and again.

Visit the locations in the novel

Epic thriller. I’ve not been this excited and enthralled with a thriller for a while. Not as brilliantly fascinating as this one. The setting is the most secretive regime in the world and this author has been there and crafted a stranger than fiction story which is as thrilling to read as I imagine it was to write. The level of research mentioned at the end of the book is quite something – hats off to the author in many ways!

As well as an explosive plot, complex characters real and fictional, political intrigue is high and the entire package is outstanding.

The setting of course really captures the imagination as its’s a country,people and regime the world knows little about. What we do know might not be true – secrecy breeds all kind of rumours.

This is what I would call a unique reading experience – on many levels. Much of the plot has been gleaned from intelligence operations and it certainly reads realistically! I was sitting on the edge of my seat half the time. It’s a mesmerising reading experience. Ooh there’s so much I want to shout about but it’ll give the plot away. You have to discover this for yourself.

I’ll need time to recover before the next book but I will be at the front of the queue!

Star of the North took me about a week to read, but I’m glad I stuck with it! It is a historical fiction novel set in North Korea. The events in the book are based on true stories from people who have escaped. ⁣
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Jenna believed that her twin sister drowned while on a trip to the beach in South Korea. When Jenna is recruited into the CIA and discovers her sister may have been abducted and living in North Korea all these years, she does everything she can to gain intelligence and try to locate her sister. ⁣
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Colonel Cho is in the upper class of the North Korean regime. He believes in the Dear Leader and all he has been taught. His brother receives a great promotion which involves a deeper background check, not just into their adoptive parents backgrounds, but their birth parents they know nothing about. Cho soon worries about being punished for his ancestors wrongdoings. ⁣
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Mrs. Moon is an elderly woman in the lower class and works on a farm. Having enough food and money to survive is always a struggle. She spies a balloon coming down from the sky that contains a package of cookies, a few other little items and a note from the people of South Korea stating they are with them and encouraging them to rise up against Kim Jong-il. This little package flips her life upside down - she trades the items to gain supplies and eventually opens a little restaurant stall at the market. She works in little and big ways to be subversive and quickly becomes a leader among the women at the market. ⁣
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I’ve read a little about North Korea, but this was a good way to get information in more of a narrative setting. I was really interested in the authors note at the end which explains the inspiration for the book and how much of it was based on fact. ⁣

I’m not the biggest fan of thrillers, but I picked this book up as it focuses on North Korea, a country I’m fascinated by. It wasn’t as gripping as promised, but I thoroughly enjoyed the story line and how D.B. John stayed true to all the historical facts about North Korea. The book intertwined three very different stories very well and remained fairly fast paced. For anyone who hasn’t read anything about North Korea, all of the details about the country will seem like a far fetched, dystopian fiction. The appendix is a nice addition which distinguishes between true and false facts.

I was enjoying the book at a leisurely pace but the culmination and the ending were so implausible (I know it’s fiction, but even still) that it really put me off from finishing the book. But as I had only 50 or so pages left I couldn’t just put it down. For me personally, the book was ruined by that particular turn of events.

Check out my full review on my blog: Boundless Pages

Loved this book!! Took me a while to get into it, but the plot soon became fast paced and intriguing. The characters were brilliantly written, and I became emotionally invested in all of their stories instantly.

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