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At university when I was studying modern Chinese history, I always shunned history books with their bare, empty facts and their clinical indifference to what's written inside them. In my opinion. history is best told in stories of the people who live through it, so I did most of my research through autobiographies. I came to this book with the expectation of doing much the same - of reading someone's story and learning more about North Korea and what life is still like for the people living there. What I didn't expect was the level of depth and meaning in the story inside. I watched Ms Park's One Young World speech (and cried along with her), and I was expecting the book to be emotional, and in particular I was looking forward to the parts when she was reunited with her family members. It wasn't emotional - but after I'd finished the book and realised it wasn't, it made perfect sense. We are taken step by step through someone's quest to survive. The lengths she's had to go through, and someone who has been starving for half her life, repeatedly raped, brutalised, lost people dear to her, and seen awful, awful things (hopefully she has managed to overcome her initial indifference to the idea of counselling!), there's too much to cope with to even know where to begin addressing any emotions. It would be disingenuous for the writer to have made this an emotional book; Ms Park hardly had time or energy for emotions. Every moment she was either trying to survive herself or trying to help her family members. There was no excess energy to be used for anything except whatever she needed to do to make it through the obstacles she was facing. And, boy, did she have to do a lot of awful things in order to survive. It takes a special type of strength to be able to be honest about the awful things that have happened to you - in particular being trafficked and raped - and I know deciding to tell that story must have been a difficult one. I don't know if she's going to read her reviews, but if she does, I want to thank her for her courage. I started reading this book at 8pm last night and I'm writing this review at 3:28am - I couldn't put it down. I watched the One Young World speech a few minutes ago again and cried (again). Ms Park talks about her desire to free North Koreans, or even to convince the Chinese government to stop persecuting North Korean Refugees who managed to escape. From the way her strength of spirit just bleeds out of the words on every page of this book, I have no doubt she will succeed.