Jacqueline the Ripper, by Karl Alexander

Karl Alexander does a wonderful job re-creating H.G. Wells in this sequel to his 1979, "Time After Time," but, as in the prior novel, he still is unable to create believable women characters. How does Amber Reese fall in love with Wells? Her immediate love makes absolutely no sense. Why does Amy Catherine Robbins Wells's second persona, "Catherine," come across as psychotic and why is Amy such a wimp? Notwithstanding the fact that at times I was ready to throw the book against the wall because the women characters were so badly developed, I finished the book because the plot was excellent and the character of H.G. Wells was so well crafted. This is why I gave the book four stars and why the book is worth reading.

Print Length: 336 pages
Publisher: Forge Books; First Edition edition (November 10, 2009)
Publication Date: November 10, 2009
Sold by: Macmillan
Language: English

Time after Time, by Karl Alexander

Karl Alexander does a very good job of bringing H.G. Wells to life as we time travel with him back to 1893. Unfortunately, Alexander doesn't make his female characters believable. This is a shame because his ability to tell a story, and his ability to describe 1893 London and 1979 San Francisco is top notch. Despite the character development problem, I highly recommend you read this book.

Print Length: 286 pages
Publisher: Forge Books (February 22, 2010)
Publication Date: February 22, 2010
Sold by: Macmillan
Language: English

Under the Same Sky: From Starvation in North Korea to Salvation in America, by Joseph Kim

You are five years old and your parents and sister love you and spoil you. You love going to school and playing with your friends. Your mother cooks your favorite foods and your father creates toys for you and your friends.

Then one day, without warning, the food gets scarcer and scarcer. There are no more toys, and you miss school in order to scrounge for food. A vast and dismal landscape of orphaned children, gangs of thugs, and dead bodies replaces the warm and happy landscape that you knew.

Is this the plot of a young adult's dystopian novel? It could be. Instead, it is the story of Joseph Kim, a child of North Korea, who lost his family and was homeless at 11 years old due to the famous famine of the 1990s and the brutal uncaring Kim dynasties. Joseph kept alive the only way possible for him, by begging, stealing, working in dangerous coal mines, fighting and joining gangs.

At thirteen, completely alone, dressed in rags and starving, he crossed into China, not caring if the Border Guards saw him. Still considering himself a thief, he learned that something called "churches" and "Christians" would give him food and money. Eventually, an American charity, "Liberty in North Korea (LiNK)," found him and brought him to the United States. You may have watched his TED Talk from Scotland or read a newspaper article about. Neither conveys the horror that a whole generation of North Korean children faced when their parents could no longer feed them and their government abandoned them. The true magnitude of the famine is unknown due to lack of information. Some reports estimate the death toll at 2 million.

This is not a brutal future depicted in a science fiction book, this is North Korea today. Joseph Kim survived in ways that would have destroyed most of us. His story deserves to be read.

Print Length: 293 pages
Publisher: Mariner Books (June 2, 2015)
Publication Date: June 2, 2015
Sold by: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

A Thousand Miles to Freedom: My Escape from North Korea, by Eunsun Kim

Eunsun Kim is not even thirty years old, but:
1. She has fled two countries, North Korea and China;
2. She was forced to leave school at 11 and spend nine years trying to survive, most of the time without sufficient food and without a real home;
3. She watched her father, grandparents and neighbors die of starvation;
4. She was sold by a human trafficker, along with her mother and sister, to an abusive family in rural China;
5. In order to reach South Korea, she and her mother were smuggled into Mongolia and had to cross the Gobi Desert at night;
6. She and her mother were forced to abandon her baby brother in China; and
7. She spent many months being interrogated by South Korean intelligence in order to prove she was not a North Korean spy.

This book is one of a growing number that exposes the true horrors of the great famine that killed over a million North Koreans in the 1990s and the brutal conditions that still exist in that country. Despite all of the above, and worse, Eunsun's love of her homeland and her hope for a free, unified Korea remains, as does her commitment to try and help children who are experiencing devastation similar to what she endured. After reading her book, the common complaints of the West seem so unimportant. This book should be required reading in every high school.

Hardcover: 240 pages
Publisher: St. Martin's Press (July 21, 2015)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1250064643
ISBN-13: 978-1250064646