We know North Korea through two lenses. The insane propaganda of the Kim Regime, and the horrific and pitiable tales of defectors. Suki Kim gives us a unique third take, based on her time as an English teacher at Pyongyang University of Science and Technology. PUST was a partnership between an Evangelical Christian community and the Regime to provide education to the elite. Suki Kim was twice a double agent; a westerner in North Korea, and a non-believer among Christians. In the fraught days just prior to the death of Kim Jong-il in 2011, she taught the children of the elite conversational and written English.

Kim ably weaves together several stands of the story. Foremost are her students. In some ways they're ideal; enthusiastic, obedient, playful and romantic in the way that young people are. The children of elite politicians and doctors, they grew up in the shadow of the famine but were protected from its worst effects. Yet at the same time they seem to have had all the individuality beaten out of them. They cannot speak with the instructors alone, they have a buddy system for mutual political reliability, and they're even organized into paramilitary platoons. As expected, the students have massive gaps in their knowledge (North Korea is the best at everything!), but more alarmingly is the casual way that they lie and invent stories to cover for each other, to paper over the authoritarian society of North Korea.

Along with this, Kim recounts her family's personal tragedy of the Korean War; an uncle lost, a grandmother driven mad by grief, and the way the arbitrary partition in 1945 broke the unified Korean people in a way that may never ever be remedied. She also recounts with delicacy her depression and isolation in the hermit kingdom, the stark prison-like setting of an elite school, and the strangeness of trips into the Pyongyang or the countryside. Beautifully and courageously written, this book is an essential addition to the literature on North Korea.