The Color of the Sky Is the Shape of the Heart

February 1, 2022
A young woman caught in between worlds reconciles with her history. "The sky is about to fall. Where do you go?" It's 2003, and first-person narrator Pak "Ginny" Jinhee considers high school--along with the world at large--"a cruel place." Descriptions of a sensitive "invisible boy in class" and her sole friend, Maggie, who is deaf, along with Ginny's poignant observations of people's shoes (her own "the most worthless") echo her earlier life and experiences. As a marginalized, mistreated Zainichi Korean from Tokyo, she "bounced around" between schools, moving from Japan to Hawaii before landing with an American host mother in Oregon. Ginny's existential troubles stem from her visceral intolerance of injustice and self-proclaimed revolutionary tactics. Compact chapters set a brisk pace, punctuated by family letters from North Korea and a scene in the format of a play that flesh out a collective history and entrenched prejudice against Koreans in Japan. The narrative pivots between Ginny's fragments of memory and her current dilemma in the U.S.: whether to exert academic effort or embrace expulsion. Flashbacks to junior high Korean school where she discovered "an unshakable freedom," despite not entirely fitting in or knowing much Korean, detail events compelling Ginny to leave and show how "an invisible thirty-eighth parallel line was drawn in Japan too." This complex, layered story, originally published in Japanese, reaches a cathartic conclusion once Ginny resolves to catch the proverbial sky as it falls, thereby forgiving herself and claiming her agency. Enigmatic and powerful. (translator's note) (Fiction. 13-adult)

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Starred review from April 18, 2022
Chesil’s introspective debut, set in 2003, follows 17-year-old Tokyo-born Korean Pak Jinhee, who goes by Ginny Park and has never felt at home in the many places she’s inhabited. After fleeing from discrimination for being Zainichi Korean in Tokyo and getting expelled from a Catholic high school in Hawaii, Ginny lives in Oregon with her presumed-white host mother, Stephanie, an award-winning author. Once again facing imminent expulsion, Ginny has three days to decide if she’ll apply herself academically and take control of her future, or remain resigned to her fate, until she’s inspired by Stephanie’s writing—“The sky is about to fall. Where do you go?”—to dive headlong into the past she’s been running from. Using a nonlinear narrative and short chapters interspersed with letters from Ginny’s grandfather, who lives in North Korea, Chesil’s intimate-feeling novel offers glimpses into Ginny’s life leading up to the present, including the incident that compelled her to leave Tokyo. Ginny is an exceptionally complex character, who is both quiet and reserved while brimming with passionate determination to combat injustice. This affecting novel sensitively explores diaspora, prejudice, and the struggle of finding a place to belong. Ages 13–up.

April 3, 2023
Grades 8-12 In this translated work, readers learn about Ginny Park, a Korean girl who was born and raised in Japan. The feeling of being in-between and not belonging to either world is something certain kids of immigrant families can relate to, and the story recounts some of the uglier side of that in-between. Based on experiences in her own childhood, Chesil writes about a girl who doesn't fit in at a Japanese school or at a Korean school, and her defiance leads her to Hawaii and eventually Oregon, where the book actually begins. The plot dips back and forth in time, starting on a rather melancholy note when Ginny is faced with the risk of being kicked out of school for not completing any work and has to confront the issue with her host mother, whom she does not want to disappoint. This accessible and expressive novel moves at an easy pace, and readers might be surprised to be nearly done with the book by the time they learn about the troubling events that led to Ginny's departure from her native country. Hand to fans of character-driven fiction with nonlinear plots.

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