Princess Bari

Strangely, the complaints I had with this are very similar to those I've had with many books I've read this year; in short, that I loved one half of the book, but the found the other lacking or at odds with the rest of the book. I really enjoyed the first half of Princess Bari, which tells the story of a young girl growing up in North Korea, during the time of the great famine of the 1990s. Bari is the seventh daughter of a couple desperate to have a son, and was named after a princess from one of the stories her grandmother likes to tell. Along with the moving portrayal of the harsh realities for this people in this time, in this part of the book there is also a very slight supernatural/magical realist element to the plot, both through the folk tales Bari's grandmother tells, and through Bari's own dreams and experiences as well, as it turns out she has a gift which means she can communicate with dead spirits and see the past lives of people around her. This half of the story is rich and beautifully done. Unfortunately, a major event in Bari's life, sends the story in a whole new direction, as Bari migrates to London. The theme of migration could have been very interesting to explore, but I felt the execution wasn't as tight as in the first half of the book. This half seemed strangely rushed, underdeveloped and dull in comparison. Furthermore, the magical realist elements become more important towards the end, as Bari believes it is her destiny to follow the life of her namesake, and her dreams become a larger focus and increasingly more bizarre. This may just be my own personal taste, however, as I prefer when magical realist books are more firmly routed in reality than in the fantastical elements. Sadly, the ending left me feeling unsatisfied.