CAT Book Club: Kim Sagwa’s Mina

While we await the winners of this year’s CLMP Firecracker Award for Fiction(opens in a new tab), we want to give you another chance to read about the book, masterfully translated by Bruce and Ju-chan Fulton.

Mina tells the story of Crystal, a teenager who toils day and night to earn top grades at her cram school. This book is dark and visceral, and if you haven’t already started reading it, check out this mesmerizing excerpt(opens in a new tab) in Granta, which begins with a dream and turns into a waking nightmare.

Originally published in Korean in 2008 by a then twenty-four-year-old Kim Sagwa, Mina has been hailed as “a powerful portrayal of teenage angst.”(opens in a new tab) But in addition to its rich characters, Mina demonstrates Kim’s ability to portray scenes with such haunting and precise language, beautifully rendered by translators Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton.

Kirkus(opens in a new tab) writes, “Kim’s prose is focused, sharp, and unflinching, even—and especially—in the novel’s gruesome scenes. We see the color of blood mixed with milk, for instance. It is ‘the color of strawberries.’ The novel is full of such vivid details, difficult to read and more difficult to forget.”

The Los Angeles Review of Books(opens in a new tab) called Mina “Kim Sagwa’s Bloody High School Novel”.

Writing in the Seattle Review of Books(opens in a new tab), bookseller Caitlin Luce Baker called Mina “one of the rawest and most honest depictions of what it’s like to be a teenager” that she’s ever read.

According to The Brooklyn Rail(opens in a new tab), the “strong characterization of these two troubled young women makes for a compelling and deeply disturbing read.”

Copies of Mina are still available, get yours now!