North Korea is known as the most repressive country on Earth, with a dictatorial leader, a starving population, and harsh punishment for rebellion. Perfect place for a family vacation, right? Yet that’s exactly where Mia Andrews finds herself, on a tour with her aid-worker father and fractious older brother, Simon. Mia was adopted from South Korea as a baby, and the trip raises tough questions about who she really is. Then her dad is arrested for spying, just as forbidden photographs of North Korean slave-labor camps fall into Mia’s hands. The only way to save Dad: get the pictures into China, over a hundred miles away.
Thus Mia and Simon set off on a harrowing journey without food, money, or shelter, in a land where anyone who sees them might turn them in and getting caught could mean prison—or worse.
Rooted in years of research and written with deep sympathy for the North Korean people, In the Shadow of the Sun is an unforgettable story of strength and survival.
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“Narrator Jackie Chung’s delivery of the precise, stilted English of the government guides suggests Mia’s sense of being an outsider. However, Chung truly sets the mood of otherworldliness in her vocalizations of the gross contradiction inherent in every aspect of North Korean life—soaring pride in contributing to the grandiose glorification of the nation and abject terror of reprisal for failing to meet the Supreme Leader’s expectations…As depicted by Chung, Mia and Simon are desperate and believable. Tension is palpable in this middle-grade thriller. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”
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AudioFile