I am thrilled to be hosting a spot on the BROTHER'S KEEPER by Julie
Lee Blog Tour hosted by Rockstar Book Tours. Check out my post and make
sure to enter the giveaway!
About the Book:
Title: BROTHER'S KEEPER
Author: Julie Lee
Pub. Date: July 21,
2020
Publisher: Holiday
House
Formats: Hardcover,
eBook, Audiobook
Pages: 304
Can two children escape North
Korea on their own?
North Korea. December, 1950.
Twelve-year-old Sora and her
family live under an iron set of rules: No travel without a permit. No
criticism of the government. No absences from Communist meetings. Wear red.
Hang pictures of the Great Leader. Don't trust your neighbors. Don't speak your
mind. You are being watched.
But war is coming, war between
North and South Korea, between the Soviets and the Americans. War causes
chaos--and war is the perfect time to escape. The plan is simple: Sora and her
family will walk hundreds of miles to the South Korean city of Busan from their
tiny mountain village. They just need to avoid napalm, frostbite, border
guards, and enemy soldiers.
But they can't. And when an
incendiary bombing changes everything, Sora and her little brother Young will
have to get to Busan on their own. Can a twelve-year-old girl and her
eight-year-old brother survive three hundred miles of warzone in winter?
Haunting, timely, and beautiful,
this harrowing novel from a searing new talent offers readers a glimpse into a
vanished time and a closed nation.
A Junior Library Guild
Selection
Excerpt:
ONE
North Korea
June 25, 1950
I didn’t want to step into the river, but I
had to. He was floating away.
“Youngsoo!” I
stomped in waist- deep, gripping my toes against the sharp- edged clams on the
rocky floor. Rushing water swirled around me. I grabbed my little brother’s
hand and dragged him back to shore.
“Sorry, Noona,”
Youngsoo said, calling me older sister in Korean. “I leaned out too far
with my net.” It wasn’t the first time he’d lost his balance and tipped over
while fi shing, his stomach smacking against the water. He shivered in his wet
uniform.
“I told you not
to go in too deep. Hold still.” I wrung the ends of his shirt and straightened
the red scarf around his neck, then took a step back and frowned. What would Omahni
say? I could already feel our mother’s punishment stick snapping against my
calves. “How could you have fallen in right before your Sonyondan Club meeting?
Your scarf is so wet, it’s almost black!”
“Don’t
worry. It’s just a scarf,” he said, looking at his feet.
I stared at him.
Everyone knew the red scarf was the most important part of the communist youth
club uniform. Red had become sacred. It fluttered in the star of our new North
Korean flag. Mothers tied and retied it cautiously around their children’s necks.
And red armbands stood out on the white of the villagers’ clothes like a
bloodstain.
Youngsoo hung his
head low. “I almost caught a fish, Noona. It slipped out of my net.”
“I know, I know,”
I said impatiently. “Every day you almost catch a big one.”
But then a pang
of regret shot through me, knowing how hard he tried despite always coming home
with an empty net.
“I’ll make it up
to you tomorrow. What kind of fish do you want? Trout? Salmon? Catfi sh?” He
puff ed up his skinny chest like a little man and extended his arm toward the
river. “Just name it, and I’ll catch it for you.”
Before I had the
chance to give him a stern sideways glance, the kind Omahni always gave me, he
smiled earnestly, a piece of black plum skin caught in his teeth. I sighed,
wondering if this was how he always kept our mother from staying mad at him too
long.
A bell chimed
from the schoolhouse on the hill. The teacher, Comrade Cho, stood in front
waiting to close the doors, a red band cinched tightly around his upper arm.
Stragglers from Youngsoo’s third- grade class sprinted past us as we headed up the
slope.
“You can’t be
dumber than the fish if you want to catch them!” a boy shouted at us, his red
scarf knotted perfectly.
Youngsoo pushed
up his sleeves. “At least I’m not dumber than you! And my sister is smarter
than everyone! Right, Noona?”
I groaned. Why
did he have to drag me into this?
“Your sister
can’t be that smart! She doesn’t even go to school anymore!” the boy called
back, laughing from the hilltop.
My shoulders
stiffened. He was right. When I’d turned twelve two months ago, Omahni had
pulled me out of school to look after my little brothers.
I glanced at
Youngsoo—so drenched and disheveled. Did he even know
how lucky he was?
“You’ll be late.”
I couldn’t look at him anymore. “Just go.”
I pushed him up
the hill. Omahni said that skipping even one communist youth club meeting meant
Youngsoo’s name—no, our family name—would go on a government watch list.
And then terrible
things would happen.
“What a beautiful
day to labor in this socialist paradise!” Comrade Cho announced as the students
approached. “Don’t forget to continue gathering scrap iron for weapons and
bullets, or else your parents will have to pay a fi ne. Your work is important in
making the Fatherland strong!”
Youngsoo joined
the wave of red running up the hill, then disappeared inside the A-frame timber
schoolhouse. Looking at it, I felt a twinge of loss.
Not for the
Girls’ Sonyondan Club that I no longer attended, joining my parents at grown-up
Party meetings instead.
Not for the new
teacher, Comrade Cho, who gave candy to students for reporting anything anti-
communist their parents said at home.
Not for the kids
in class, who were loyal to the Party first and family second, and could never
be trusted as friends.
But for all the
learning I was missing. Math. Geography. Science.
When I could
escape from my chores, I hid behind the willow tree by the school window and
eavesdropped on the class.
Today, though,
was not a day for escaping chores. I picked up my laundry basket and balanced
it on top of my head. The sound of wooden paddles beckoned me back toward the
river, and like a funeral marcher, I went.
Downstream,
mounds of laundry littered the bank. Women squatted on flat boulders jutting
from the sandbars. They scrubbed pants with thick bar soap, their shoulders
pumping like pistons, then beat them with fl at paddles as if spanking their children.
Without any men nearby, the women gossiped about husbands and mothers-in-law as
they lifted their shirts to wipe their faces. I looked away.
“Yah,
Sora! What are you so embarrassed about?” asked Mrs. Lee, her cheeks ruddy from
the sun.
I smiled, tight-
lipped, and found an open area to set my basket. My long tan skirt was soaked
from saving Youngsoo.
“Why’s your mom
sending a girl to do a woman’s job, huh?” a farmer’s wife shouted.
“Who else is she
supposed to send—her sons? Anyway, Sora’s not such a little
girl anymore, right?” Mrs. Lee said. “Look, she’s even starting to get little
breasts now.” She poked me in the ribs, and I jerked like a string puppet.
They laughed
heartily. My cheeks burned, and I hunched my back to hide my chest. I gazed up
at the schoolhouse as if it might somehow reach down to save me, the straw
basket pressing against my shins. But it wouldn’t, and the laundry wouldn’t wash
itself.
I took out my
brothers’ dirty clothes—Jisoo’s cloth diapers, Youngsoo’s muddy uniform pants—and crouched in the shallows, joining the
drumbeat of women. I plunged my raw knuckles into the soapy water, hiding them
beneath the cloudy white.
A grandmother
came running from around the hill, splashing along the river’s edge toward the
rest of us, and I watched the waves ripple over my hands. At first I hardly
noticed the whispers, the way the women huddled around her. But their murmurs grew,
and I looked up at them—their mouths agape, their brows creased—and suddenly everything felt wrong.
The women started
hastily packing unfinished laundry into their baskets. I rushed to rinse
Youngsoo’s uniform pants. Something was not right. I needed to go. The last
time a message had spread this urgently, the landlord’s son was found floating
facedown in the river, his body bloated like a blood sausage. I lifted the
basket onto my head and hurried onto the main road through the village center,
stumbling past a row of thatched- roof houses, my breath coming fast and hard.
“Noona!”
I spun around and
saw Youngsoo running along the bank. He stopped short before crashing into me.
“What are you
doing here? Were you sent home? Was it the wet scarf? Are they putting us on a
list?” I asked, my voice rising with panic.
“No, something
amazing happened!” Youngsoo’s eyes shimmered like the river, and he practically
sang the words: “We don’t have to go to school anymore!”
My stomach
clenched. “What do you mean, Youngsoo? That’s impossible.”
“Comrade Cho told
the whole class that ‘because of the current situation, there will be no school
until further notice,’ ” he said, carefully repeating his teacher’s words. “He
even said that ‘today will be a day to go down in history.’ ” Youngsoo jumped high
in the air, hollering and hooting at his sudden change in luck. “No more
school! No more school!”
My palms turned
cold and clammy.
“We need to go
home,” I managed to say. “Come on.”
We walked past
streams flowing into rivers, then through plains and pastures until we could
see the rice- straw roof of our home. The house was square-shaped to block the
bitter winds cascading down the mountains in winter, and it sat squat in the
countryside, fifty miles north of Pyongyang, the capital. Although it looked
like every other farmhouse in the valley, it was unmistakably home, the rounded
edges of the worn, thatched roof hugging the house like a mushroom cap. Around it,
fields of corn and millet stirred in the hot wind.
We hurried
inside. A broadcaster’s voice and the hiss of static rushed to greet us. I set
the basket down and stepped into a pair of house slippers.
Abahji sat as motionless as a rock, leaning in to the
radio. Deep lines creased his forehead. I had never seen our father look so
grave.
Beside him, Baby
Jisoo looked up from a pile of clean clothes, yawned once, then went back to
his favorite pastime: pulling socks over each of his feet.
Youngsoo and I
sat on the floor beside Abahji. I quieted my breathing to hear, but I couldn’t
understand the announcer’s words through the heavy static. I turned to Youngsoo
and shrugged, unable to explain Abahji’s pensive face.
All at once, the
signal cleared, and Youngsoo’s eyes brightened as if he had just solved a
riddle.
“That’s what
my teacher was talking about. That’s the reason there will be no more
school!” he shouted, pointing at the radio. “War! War! Starting today, we are
at war!”
About Julie:
Julie Lee graduated from
Cornell University with a degree in history. After working in market research
in Manhattan for over ten years, she decided to pursue writing full-time.
Currently, Julie lives in Georgia with her husband and three children. When she
is not spending time with her family, she is working on her next book while
pursuing an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults at the Vermont College
of Fine Arts. Brother's Keeper is her debut novel.
Giveaway Details:
3 winners will receive a finished
copy of BROTHER'S KEEPER, US Only.
Tour Schedule:
Week One:
8/24/2020
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Review
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8/24/2020
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Instagram Post
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8/25/2020
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Excerpt
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8/25/2020
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Excerpt
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8/25/2020
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Instagram Post
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8/26/2020
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Excerpt
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8/26/2020
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Review
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8/26/2020
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Excerpt
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8/27/2020
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Spotlight
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8/27/2020
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Instagram Post
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8/28/2020
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Review
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8/28/2020
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Instagram Post
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Week Two:
8/31/2020
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Review
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8/31/2020
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Review
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9/1/2020
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Review
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9/1/2020
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Review
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9/1/2020
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Instagram Post
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9/2/2020
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Review
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9/2/2020
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Excerpt
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9/3/2020
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Review
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9/3/2020
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Instagram Post
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9/4/2020
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Review
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9/4/2020
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Review
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9/4/2020
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Excerpt
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My daughter would enjoy this book! Looks interesting!
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