Year of Impossible Goodbyes

Sook Nyul Choi

Sep 1991 · HarperCollins

About this ebook

This autobiographical story tells of ten-year-old Sookan and her family's suffering and humiliation in Korea, first under Japanese rule and after the Russians invade, and of a harrowing escape to South Korea.

Ratings and reviews

I read this story when I was little and I still love it. The typos for me don't matter, but someone could do well to edit.

a very heartwarming and heart-wrenching book. for a person like me that is highly empathetic I was able to connect to every one of the characters in the book and to slightly feel what emotions the characters were experiencing in the book.

I found this novel pretty cool. I like quests, journeys, all lost hope. For me, I really thought it was awesome. But.... Sometimes the writing was kind of silly. Like, people would just start crying, and the author would go onto the next thing. Also, there were tons of grammatical mistakes, like forgetting periods, and say hut instead of but. If you're a grammar Nazi, you prob. don't want to read it. Overall, it's sad with a bitter sweet ending.

About the author

Born in Pyongyang, North Korea, Sook Nyul Choi spent two and a half years as a refugee in Pusan during the Korean War. She later immigrated to the United States to pursue her college education at Manhattanville College. She taught school in New York City for twenty years while she and her husband raised two daughters. Echoes of the White Giraffe is a sequel to Sook Nyul Choi’s first novel, Year of Impossible Goodbyes, which won the Judy Lopez Children’s Book Award.