Kim Ae-ran

The plot has all the ingredients of a tear-jerker - Aerum has a debilitating illness that makes him age at an abnormal pace. He can't go to school and hence does not have any friends his age. Just when he thought he has his first friend around his age and he was even entertaining thoughts of love, he found that he had been deceived by a man who wanted to milk his story for a novel. And his young parents spent all their money on his medical bills. Despite all these, the book felt flat. Not sure why but it just didn't move me.… (more)

Teenage Areum living in a geriatric body, has just reached the age of his parents when he was born. He tells of his parents' lives, how he came to be, his friendship with the old man who lives with his older father and is treated as a child. And of his efforts to write these stories, of his appearance on television to raise funds for his final hospitalization as he is going blind.
This has got to be one of the triumphs of translation for the language is fluid and straightforward and caressing, of this youth trapped in age tale which has so much to say of those who spent so much longer acquiring their aches and pains, but who feel more than just echos of a teenage self.
Only in the last page did I feel the least bit manipulated by the author, but that smarted.… (more)