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The Impossible Fairy Tale

A Novel

Graywolf Press

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ISBN10: 1555977669
ISBN13: 9781555977665

Paperback

192 Pages

$16.00

CA$22.99

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A chilling, wildly original novel from a major new voice from South Korea

The Impossible Fairy Tale is the story of two unexceptional grade-school girls. Mia is “lucky”—she is spoiled by her mother and, as she explains, her two fathers. She gloats over her exotic imported color pencils and won’t be denied a coveted sweater. Then there is the Child who, by contrast, is neither lucky nor unlucky. She makes so little impression that she seems not even to merit a name.

At school, their fellow students, whether lucky or luckless or unlucky, seem consumed by an almost murderous rage. Adults are nearly invisible, and the society the children create on their own is marked by cruelty and soul-crushing hierarchies. Then, one day, the Child sneaks into the classroom after hours and adds ominous sentences to her classmates’ notebooks. This sinister but initially inconsequential act unlocks a series of events that end in horrible violence.

But that is not the end of this eerie, unpredictable novel. A teacher, who is also this book’s author, wakes from an intense dream. When she arrives at her next class, she recognizes a student: the Child, who knows about the events of the novel’s first half, which took place years earlier. Han Yujoo’s The Impossible Fairy Tale is a fresh and terrifying exploration of the ethics of art making and of the stinging consequences of neglect.

Reviews

Praise for The Impossible Fairy Tale

"Yujoo’s writing is fearless and distinguished by a refusal to acknowledge syntactical boundaries or rules."—The Rumpus

"This is a work whose author has delved deeply into the question of what stories and storytelling mean to us, for good and for ill, and who has the boldness to push this novel into unpredictable yet emotionally wrenching territory. . . . It’s a powerful and primal work, a deliberately constructed story that incorporates irrationality, fear and change, and holds the reader’s attention throughout."—Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

"This début novel sketches the barbaric politics of elementary school with terrifying clarity: loyalties won and dissolved over hair ties, the instinctive violence of small humans barely cognizant of consequence or remorse. In the novel’s second half, a girl, known only as The Child, whose mother adds to the schoolyard cruelties by beating her and leaving her unfed, begins to pay menacing visits to Yujoo’s writerly alter ego, demanding to know why she was forced to inhabit such a macabre story. 'It was your plan to have me atone for the sins I didn’t even commit,' The Child accuses. The narrative turn is both exuberantly postmodern and in dead earnest."—The New Yorker