Review by Booklist Review
Yona is an employee of Jungle, a South Korean company that arranges expensive tours and vacation packages to areas ravaged by such disasters as droughts, typhoons, tsunamis, avalanches, and earthquakes. Despite her 10-year employment at Jungle, 33-year old Yona is not impervious to sexual harassment and endures multiple abuses at the hands of her supervisor. To avoid her resignation, the company offers her an all-expense-paid trip to one of their fledgling vacation destinations. She agrees to go as an evaluator and joins four vacationers traveling to Mui, an island off the coast of Vietnam. Not only is the destination spot managed poorly, the featured attraction is a lackluster sinkhole. Yona uncovers the resort's intricate and risky plan to, unbeknownst to Jungle, engineer a bigger sinkhole featuring fake casualties to be captured on video with dramatic aplomb. As Yona becomes entangled in the mesh of reality and a manufactured catastrophe, her situation quickly spins out of control. Ko-Eun's ecothriller skillfully explores the intertwined themes of tourism, livelihood, greed, and the value of human life.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
South Korean author Yun's spare but provocative novel (after the collection Table for One) offers perceptive satire laced with disconcerting imagery. In her mid-30s, Yona Ko has devoted the last decade of her life to her employer, Jungle, which offers package tours to areas of the world ravaged by disasters, from hurricanes to nuclear meltdowns. After being sexually assaulted by her boss and assigned to a new role, Yona suspects she's being pushed out of the company. On the verge of quitting, she's given a new opportunity: evaluate the disaster ecosystem on a Vietnamese island (a sinkhole, a volcano) and determine whether the destination should be kept in Jungle's portfolio. Upon arriving, Yona soon realizes that the island's power brokers are aware that their tourist income is imperiled, and she is appalled when an investor tells her of a plan to engineer a sinkhole during a village festival that would kill at least 100 people, after which they would use international aid for urban redevelopment. In Yona's increasingly bizarre encounters, she learns just how severe the local environmental degradation is and the frightening extent of corporate greed. Yun cleverly combines absurdity with legitimate horror and mounting dread. With its arresting, nightmarish island scenario, this work speaks volumes about the human cost of tourism in developing countries. (Aug.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A burned-out employee at a South Korean tourism company is shipped off on an adventure of her own that slowly spirals out of control. Jungle seems to be just the kind of company made for a world regularly besieged by hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, and all manner of tragedy. It packages the events into attractive deals for "disaster tourists," people looking for a new kind of thrill in the experience-driven Instagram age. For 10 years, Yona Ko has worked at Jungle, chasing disasters and creating the next bestselling package. But when Yona speaks up after her boss sexually assaults her, she is shipped off on a work trip. She must travel to Mui, a distant island, part of Jungle's disaster programming catalog. Years ago, a giant sinkhole appeared on Mui, and tourists flocked in to soak up the aftermath. But Mui is losing its luster, and Yona must grade its worthiness on Jungle's list of offerings. Through a series of unfortunate events, Yona discovers just how much is on the line for the desperate citizens of Mui. If they lose the Jungle program's visitors, they lose everything. Yun's novel spirals into increasingly bizarre events as Mui battles for its very survival and, alarmingly, pulls out all the stops. The Jungle is an effective model for capitalism--the Upton Sinclair echo might resonate with some. Mui too efficiently fills in for every community in the world pitted against the rest, scraping the bottom of the barrel for survival as it faces an increasingly harsh reality. But Yona remains frustratingly opaque, her background story needing more color. The taut storyline keeps the narrative moving at a tight pace even if the takeaways feel ham-handed at times. A sharp sendup of society's obsession with the next hot thing--and the steep toll it extracts on very real lives. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
