Kirkus (Kirkus Reviews, 1993)
In a sequel to the autobiographical Year of Impossible Goodbyes (1991, ALA Notable), Sookan, now 15, is again a refugee. After 1945, the family was reunited in Seoul and established a comfortable home. But as the story opens, Sookan is in coastal Posan, studying at a refugee school. Separated from Father and her older brothers--whose fate they won't know for two years--by the bombing of Seoul, Sookan and her mother and youngest brother are living high on a mountain where she's awakened each morning by a poet shouting on a nearby peak. The earlier book hinged on political events and the cruelties and injustices of war; more quietly, this one examines war's sorrows and the courage and compromises of those growing up in its shadow. Sookan comforts an orphaned friend; mourns the Shouting Poet, though they've never met; and, despite her shyness, defies tradition to rendezvous with a male friend. Though each plans to enter holy orders, their love for poetry and music draws them into a poignant, chaste accord that reveals a great deal about the culture and their own character. Their parting, a Sookan heads for college in the US, leaves much unspoken, and is just one of the many separations and losses composing this book. Except for Sookan, the characters are less fully realized than before; instead, wonderfully telling scenes evoke the time, the place, and--more subtly--the deep-running emotions that these people, bound by custom and besieged by troubles, were so rarely free to acknowledge. 1993, Houghton Mifflin, $13.95. Starred Review. © 1993 Kirkus Reviews/VNU eMedia, Inc. All rights reserved.

Betsy Hearne (The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, June 1993 (Vol. 46, No. 10))
In this sequel to Choi's dynamic Year of Impossible Goodbyes (BCCB 10/91), teenaged Sookan recounts her experience as a refugee for two and a half years in Pusan, where she and her mother and younger brother have fled after the bombing of Seoul. Separated again from her father and older brothers, Sookan helps her mother get enough food, water, and supplies to eke out their existence in a barren shack high atop a mountain so slick with mud that they can barely manage to climb it every day. To some extent, the author has abandoned the storytelling style that casts such a spell in the first book; this one relates a situation without developing it consistently as fiction or decisively as nonfiction. For instance, the three older brothers who are introduced near the end of the book appear too briefly to become familiar despite their importance to the main character; we know that they are real in a factual sense and that she knows them, but we don't know them because their activities are summarized rather than detailed. Of course, the pace of waiting is always more technically difficult to sustain than the pace of survival. Like Siegal's Grace in the Wilderness (the sequel to Upon the Head of the Goat), this must abandon wartime drama for a kind of post-traumatic stress syndrome that is inherently less forceful. There are, however, some powerful scenes, along with a well-realized romance that is doomed by religious commitment and social differences; Sookan's total sense of displacement will offer young readers a natural point of empathy. Ad--Additional book of acceptable quality for collections needing more material in the area. (c) Copyright 1993, The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. 1993, Houghton, 137p, $13.95. Grades 6-9.

Horn Book (The Horn Book Guide, 1993)
The sequel to 'The Year of Impossible Goodbyes' (Houghton) begins some four years later, when Sookan, her brother Inchun, and her mother are once again refugees, having been driven from their comfortable home in Seoul by the war. A forbidden but pure friendship with a boy her own age causes Sookan to question some of the strictures of her culture and leads her to a decision to study in the United States after the war. A quiet, but moving, coming-of-age story. Category: Fiction. 1993, Houghton, 139pp.. Ages 14 to 18. Rating: 3: Recommended, satisfactory in style, content, and/or illustration.