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by Kim Yideum
Blood Sisters tells the story of Jeong Yeoul, a young Korean college student in the 1980's, when the memory of President Chun Doohwan's violent suppression of student demonstrations against martial law was still fresh.
Yideum captures with raw honesty the sense of dread felt by many Korean women during this time as Jeong struggles in a swirl of misguided desires and hopelessness against a society distorted by competing ideologies, sexual violence, and cultural conservatism. Facing this helplessness, her impulse is to escape into the world of art. Blood Sisters is a vivid, powerful portrayal of a woman's efforts to live an authentic life in the face of injustice.
"Yideum is primarily a poet and this is evident in the texture and sensuality of her prose, skillfully translated by Ji Yoon Lee." ―Asymptote
"Unapologetically feminist... The novel has as much to say about the contemporary #MeToo era as it does '80s South Korea." ―Spectrum Culture
This information about Blood Sisters was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Kim Yideum, an outspoken feminist hailed as one of the greatest poets in South Korea today, whose works in translation include Cheer Up, Femme Fatale! (Action Books, 2015) and Hysteria (Action Books, 2019). Having received her PhD with a dissertation on Korean feminist poetics, she has taught at Gyeongsang National University, served as a culture columnist, and has hosted a poetry radio show. She has received numerous awards for her poetry, including the Poetry & the World Literary Award (2010), the Kim Daljin Changwon Award (2011), the 22nd Century Literary Award (2015) and the Kim Chunsoo Award (2015). Ms. Kim owns and operates Café Yideum, a bookstore café, in Ilsan, a satellite city of Seoul. Blood Sisters, originally published to great renown in South Korea in 2011, is her debut novel.
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