Description "It took courage to stand somewhere high." A coming-of-age novel for everyone rising above a heart full of contradictions. Baek On-yu's full-length novel Yuwon, a story that offers new hope in a voice filled with sincerity, has been published. Yuwon tells the story of its eighteen-year-old protagonist, Yuwon, who survived a tragic fire more than a decade ago. The novel delicately portrays the intimate wounds and ethical dilemmas that arise from her relationships: the older sister who saved her life and lost her own in the fire; the man who caught her as she fell from the eleventh floor and whose body and life were shattered as a result; and Su-hyeon, a friend who quietly entered her lonely days. Throughout, complex emotions—survivor's guilt, indebtedness toward family, self-loathing, hatred, and compassion—flow in a precarious, tension-filled current. Praised by the judges of the Changbi Young Adult Literature Award and a panel of 146 teen readers as "a powerful story that shatters prejudice" and "gripping writing that captures the heart," the novel won the 2020 Changbi Young Adult Literature Award. Let us listen to Yuwon's voice as she lays bare a heart full of contradictions too difficult to put into words. Any teenager growing through pain in their own place—and anyone who has passed through that stage of life—will find a moment of healing here. This is a coming-of-age novel for everyone who rises up, freed from a heavy heart. When an incident we thought was over becomes the seed of every misfortune to come, can we survive again? When the arduous journey of the heart reaches its final stretch, we come to realize: this story is our own shining record of survival, of the moment we mustered the greatest courage of our lives to decide to live a life truly our own. — Yoon Ga-eun (film director, The World of Us) Healing is not about instilling good feelings, but about helping a person discover their true feelings as they are. I offer Yuwon, a healing novel that lets new skin grow over the everyday traumas so many of the "me"s around me are living through. — Jung Hye-shin (psychiatrist, author of You Are Right) Isn't the very existence of "I" itself a great debt? Reflective sentences, a keen gaze, the voice of a new generation. Yuwon is an eighteen-year-old high school student who survived an apartment fire twelve years ago. When a cigarette butt carelessly discarded by an elderly neighbor upstairs sparked a fire that spread down to the floor below, Yuwon's older sister wrapped her in a wet blanket and dropped her from the eleventh-floor veranda to the crowd watching below, saving her life. Yuwon was six years old at the time, and the memories and images of that day have irrevocably carved themselves into her heart. The story begins when church visitors come to mark the birthday of Yuwon's late sister. The fact that her sister was celebrated for her birthday just days before she passed away is nearly the family's only comfort. Yuwon feels guilt and pressure over the fact that her sister—someone so many people were proud of—died saving her. She feels she must be "happy enough for her sister's share too" and must "live twice as hard." Yet even after twelve years have passed since her sister's death, Yuwon finds it bewildering and almost absurd that people still remember her sister in such vivid detail, and honoring her memory grows only more burdensome. If there is someone who steadies Yuwon whenever her heavy heart makes her stumble, there is also someone who torments her: the man who caught her as she fell from the eleventh floor. Every year, without fail, he visits Yuwon's family on her sister's birthday. The moment he limps into the living room, an uncomfortable air fills the entire house. Having ruined his leg while saving Yuwon, the man still occasionally borrows money from her parents or stays for dinner, even twelve years later. Once hailed as a "brave, righteous man" and "citizen hero," his current dependence on her family stirs in Yuwon a tangled mix of pity, unease, guilt, and revulsion. In this way, Yuwon gives voice to a girl living her daily life amid relationships where harm and victimhood cannot be easily separated. Amid anonymous comments left on decade-old news articles about the fire, and among neighbors who still remember her only as "the fire survivor" or "the blanket baby," the world appears absurd to Yuwon, once called a "symbol of miracle." How is she to handle this confusion? "The articles from twelve years ago often used words like 'hope,' 'miracle,' or 'light.' The attempt to find, in me specifically, things that are rare in the world as a whole feels like a kind of violence." (p. 191) Meanwhile, on the school rooftop where she often goes to be alone, Yuwon meets her classmate Su-hyeon, and the two slowly grow closer, despite Su-hyeon's blunt personality being so different from her own. Little by little, Yuwon opens the door of her guarded heart to the world outside, and when she finally confides her long-held inner wounds to Su-hyeon, she learns that Su-hyeon has carried hidden pain of her own. As Yuwon and Su-hyeon share the weight of their hearts and lean on one another, they come to realize that empathy has the power to pull someone out of their own personal hell. "The trouble with guilt is that it doesn't end with simple apology—it spreads like a complication. Self-loathing, self-reproach, depression. My unconscious mind, trying to protect itself, quickly turned my anger at myself into anger at others. Whenever I grew too heavy with that and began to stumble, Su-hyeon was the one who steadied me." (p. 247) "The meaning of my name is 願 (won), as in to wish, to hope." May the faint hope that blooms in this novel comfort us all. Yuwon naturally brings to mind the painful incidents that have occurred in Korean society. No one can fully imagine the emotional weight that Yuwon, both victim and central figure of the incident, had to bear—from a childhood that should have been filled with love, to the days when even others' comfort left her wounded and suspicious, forced to read the room. And yet Yuwon does not rashly blame others or fall into easy despair. What she reflects on is her own fragile, tender inner self, and the equally fragile inner selves of those around her. Reading Yuwon leads us to reconsider what responsibility and indebtedness mean, what sin and forgiveness mean, what love and compassion mean. In Yuwon's voice, calmly gazing upon ripples of the heart she could confide to no one else, we sense the depth of life and a literary truth. To read Yuwon is to gain the courage to hold fast to the meaning of the life that continues to unfold ahead. The meaning of Yuwon's name is 願 (won)—to wish, to hope. It is a name that will linger long in readers' hearts. Reading Yuwon, we relearn what recovery truly means: to carry, or to set down, a weight too heavy to bear, without being consumed by hatred. To live alongside loss. To grow stronger and lighter at once. Remembering the dense, fervent sentences of this novel, I feel I can always summon that kind of courage. — Lee Seul-a (writer, publisher of Daily Lee Seul-a) ★★★ Rave Reviews from 300 Advance Readers ★★★ "A story I want to share with anyone suffering from the hatred growing inside their heart." — @nosilv********* "It's hard to put into words feelings you don't even understand yourself, but this book manages to do just that." — @areu**** "The dazzlingly blue sky felt like hope in their lives—something high above, letting them fly further and further." — @book_jeo***** "I wanted to wrap Won in a tight hug." — @booook_wi***** "A book to reach for when you feel sorry for waking up in the morning, when the very things that saved you feel like they're choking you." — @pangb***** "A coming-of-age novel I truly enjoyed reading. I was sad to see it end." — @janey**** "A story of ceaseless conflict and growth—between the self within me and the world around me." — @kim.h***** "I've resolved to remember that the routine, emotionless things we say every day can sometimes cut sharply into someone else." — @pamiy*****