Name: The Court Dancer
ISBN: 9781681777870

Kyung-Sook Shin

Set during the dramatic final years of the Korean Empire, the new novel from Man Asian Literary Prize winner Kyung-Sook Shin features a mysterious dancer caught up in the dizzying sweep of history.

The Court Dancer

Marvelously told story of Yi Jin, a talented Korean court dancer for Empress Min of the Joeson Dynasty who travels to France in the early 1900s.  It's another tale of a vibrant intelligent woman beaten into the ground by global politics at the turn of the 20th century, one that will teach you all the ways a dancer can fly and fall.

Lily Elizabeth Labella

Daryl Houston

This was fine, if kind of sluggish at times for how short it is. The writing (translation) seemed capable enough. Occasionally, there'd be sort of a little almost koan thrown in, and I wondered if this wasn't a hallmark of Korean literature or thinking; it could also just be a quirk of the writer or translator. I felt like this gave me a neat roughly historical view of late-19th-century Korea that was new to me, but it wasn't as vibrant or compelling a story as, say, Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet.