Book Summary and Reviews of And the River Drags Her Down by Jihyun Yun

And the River Drags Her Down by Jihyun Yun

And the River Drags Her Down

by Jihyun Yun

  • Critics' Consensus (4):
  • Published:
  • Oct 2025, 400 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

She has always known the rules – never resurrect anything larger than the palm of her hand, but that was before her sister died. A chilling, compulsive exploration of sisterhood, loss, and revenge.

When her older sister is found mysteriously drowned in the river that cuts through their small coastal town, Soojin Han disregards every rule and uses her ancestral magic to bring Mirae back from the dead. At first, the sisters are overjoyed, reveling in late-night escapades and the miracle of being together again, but Mirae grows tired of hiding from the world. She becomes restless and hungry ...

Driven by an insatiable desire to finish what she started in life, to unravel the truth that crushed her family so many years ago, Mirae is out for revenge.

When their town is engulfed by increasingly destructive rain and a series of harrowing, unusual deaths, Soojin is forced to reckon with the fact that perhaps the sister she brought back isn't the one she knew.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"A beautifully written, grief-filled tale that's equal parts creepy and heart-wrenching." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Lyrical prose renders meaningful, tear-jerking sequences and propulsive horror alongside frank examinations of the cycles of generational trauma." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Yun beautifully captures the haunting of family myths in this slow-burn horror. Eerie and poignant, And the River Drags Her Down will sweep readers into its relentless current." —Trang Thanh Tran, New York Times bestselling author of She Is a Haunting

"A river-stained book about sisterhood, selfishness, and the human desire to be understood and loved ... Heart-wrenchingly beautiful." —Andrew Joseph White, New York Times bestselling author of Hell Followed with Us and Compound Fracture

This information about And the River Drags Her Down 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.

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Author Information

Jihyun Yun

Jihyun Yun is a Korean American writer from the San Francisco Bay Area who now resides in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She is the author of Some Are Always Hungry, a Prairie Schooner Prize winning poetry collection. A recipient of various fellowships and grants, she received her BA in Psychology from UC Davis and an MFA in poetry from New York University. And The River Drags Her Down is her debut novel.

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