"Our beaches are still waiting for the end of a war that’s been going on for so long people have stopped believing it’s real. They build hotels, put up neon signs, but it’s all fake, we’re on a knife-edge, it could all give way any moment. We’re living in limbo. In a winter that never ends."

this book is so deeply cold and haunting. dusapin's grasp on atmospheric setting and juxtaposition of parallel narratives kept me on edge—constantly waiting for something to happen in a place where nothing ever happens. the narrator is dying for validation, to be seen in a real way, and for her circumstances to change all while surrounded by as cast of characters that feel ultimately insincere, plasticine, and desperate for their own sort of validation that the narrator can't give them. and beyond all that is a thrumming awareness of how static life is on a knife's edge waiting for the war-not-war to end. dusapin through the narrator's eyes juggles the seoul experience of ever moving city life against that of the narrator who is actively living through a war "people stopped believing is real." incredibly compelling little book where nothing happening is entirely the point.