Description ■ A Damned Beauty "Snowball Drive" shows just how far oppression and despair can reach when catastrophe becomes an everyday reality. Preservative-laced snow falls more and more, burying all the world's filth beneath it. A city blanketed entirely in white is sadly beautiful, but no one can speak of that beauty because "it doesn't feel right to think it's pretty." At the 'Center,' a facility where the snow is incinerated and disposed of, workers in their early twenties—people like the two protagonists, Moru and Iwol, whose teenage years have been half erased—live together in dormitories. They sleep together, eat together, and ride the same commuter bus to and from the Center, feeling as though they're reliving school life all over again. And yet, somehow, they can't laugh often the way students do, because it doesn't feel right to be happy. Even in the moments when I am laughing, somewhere in a corner of the Center, workers go missing in avalanches—and because something as small as a missing employee doesn't warrant a rescue team, one might someday come face-to-face, mid-shift, with the frozen corpse of a former colleague. To be unable to call something beautiful even as it stands right before your eyes—that is the most wretched consequence of catastrophe seeping into the deepest parts of life. ■ A Color Different from White Snow The protagonist Moru stays behind at the Center, searching for traces of her missing aunt, who left behind only one unexpected clue: a snow globe. Despite the grueling labor, skin cracked from dryness, and the corpses she must face in the snow every day, Moru cannot leave the Center, where all manner of refuse gathers, for fear that her aunt might someday turn up among the bodies. Then one day, Iwol, who attended the same middle school as Moru, comes to work at the Center. Through Iwol, memories begin to bloom anew: the tedium of school, an ordinary day spent eating grapes and watching television, the excited atmosphere of a graduation ceremony. In a colorless present where everyone must wear identical hazmat suits covering their entire bodies, in a world buried under white snow, only Iwol reflects back the past, a time when everyone had their own color. Can those forgotten hues of the past color in the black-and-white present and the opaque future? Will a world of colors other than white snow ever come? As critic In Ah-young writes in her recommendation, "Snowball Drive" is a novel about "the courage to grow stronger by holding each other's hands in a world with nowhere to run." The steps that Moru and Iwol take together will serve as a firm source of encouragement for all of us who hesitate before uncertainty.