Banned Book Club

Today's book review is on Banned Book Club by Kim Hyun Sook, Ko Hyung-Ju, Ryan Estrada. Is 198 pages long and is published by Iron circus comics. The governor has the main character Hyon Sook on it blushing holding a book with her classmates behind her in celebration. The reader is someone who is interested in a fictionalized account of South Korea's protest in the 1980s. There is mild foul language talk of sexuality and rape and violence in this graphic novel.  The story is told from third person close of the main character Hyun Sook.  There Be Spoilers Ahead.

From the back of the book- 1983 during South Korea's V Republic, a military regime that has entrenched its power through censorship, torture, and the murder of protesters. In this charged political climate, a freshman named Kim Hyun Sook takes refuge in the comfort of books. With a handsome young editor of the school newspaper invites her to his reading club, she expects to talk about Moby Dick, Hamlet, and The Scarlet Letter. Instead, she finds herself hiding in a basement as the youngest member of an underground Banned Book Club. As Kim Hyun Sook soon discovers, in a totalitarian regime, the delights of discovering great works of illicit literature are quickly overshadowed by fear and violence.

In Banned Book Club,Kim Hyun Sook shares her dramatic true story of political strife, fear mongering, the death of democratic institutions, and the Relentless rebellion of reading. 

Review-  A moving and chilling account of protesting in South Korea told from someone who survived them. We follow our main character, Hyun Sook, starting college against her mother's wishes all the way to almost the present day where she is still active in protesting corruption in her government. The black and white images help convey the horror and at the same time making it easier for the reader. The police brutality would be harder to take in I think if it was in full color. Hyun Sook never wanted to get involved in the protesting, she just wanted to go to college but she learned that in order to truly go to college, to truly learn about the world she was going to have to get involved. I highly recommend this graphic novel for its honest depiction of a totalitarian regime, the people who are just trying to survive it, and the people who were trying to do something about it. I feel that something we need to be thinking about in our modern-day, it is not something that has been left in the past. 

I give this graphic novel a Five out of Five stars. I get nothing for my review and I borrowed this book from my local library.