In this book there are a lot of characters. There names are Sookan, the grandfather, Inchun, the mother, Aunt Tiger, Kisa and there were many other characters that were mentioned briefly. This book is about Sookan a young girl who tries to escape with her family to South Korea which is below the 38th parallel. The problem is the other countries, especially Russia, took over Korea so that other families canít leave. Russia made them practice their religion not the Korean's religion. Then her brother and her got separated from the rest of her family and she and her brother got into a lot problems. For example, they had to ask for food at a market because they were starving. They had many problems. They solved these problems by other people helping, so they can escape. Finally they met their family in the south and they live happy ever after; until the next book.

I am going to explain the climate landforms and other things that influenced this book. In this book the climate was fairly hot but they still had four seasons. It seemed as if it was very hilly and mountainous but there was also rice fields which made it flat too. There was the 38th parallel which divides Korea into two parts. The north part was owned by the Russians who made them work and the south part was the free part which was owned by the Koreans.

This book was wonderful. When the author explained all of the scenes, she went into detail with lots of action words. She also made her story very visual. She used a lot of words which explained Korea's setting in Asia. She always had rising action which means there are a lot of problems in the story which makes it interesting. There was also a lot of falling action too but I like the rising action because it explained characters and the setting more. She also really explained the characters. If you wanted to meet one of the characters you could definitely pick out the character because she puts so much detail into it. Overall I would rate the book 9. It's a great book with lots of history in it.