104 Time February 3, 2020
TimeOff Books
make their escape, Noi finds herself stuck in a particu-
larly vicious flashback from her childhood, in which
she is asked to strip for an older man.
In Snow Hunters, Yoon played with structure to
showcase the impact of violence on his protagonist
over several years. Here, his decision to begin the
book when the characters are young proves devastat-
ing and essential. In understated prose, he shows how
they grow out of their teenage voices amid their fight
for survival. As children around the world continue to
grow up surrounded by violence and war, authors like
Yoon seek to understand how experiencing those hor-
rors shapes the adults they eventually become. And in
Run Me to Earth, those horrors are scattered like un-
exploded bombs, waiting to go off at any time. •The orphaned Teenagers aT The cenTer of
Paul Yoon’s latest novel like to fantasize about trav-
eling to far-off places at night. They go to Paris or
the moon. One visits a “very large” ship. As their
days dip into darkness, 17-year-olds Prany and Ali-
sak and 16-year-old Noi, Prany’s sister, imagine
that they are anywhere other than the bombed-out
makeshift hospital where they sleep each evening.
In Run Me to Earth, the group of childhood
friends assists a doctor by transporting supplies
across 1960s Laos, where bombs rain down, leav-
ing many injured or dead. But when they return
from their trips, the three watch the stars through
a slit in the ceiling and dream of all the places
they’d rather be. Home is not one of those places,
because home no longer exists for these charac-
ters. Places that were once comfortable and famil-
iar to the teens are now ravaged by war; people
they loved have been lost to unrelenting violence.
Instead, Prany, Alisak and Noi develop an intense
fascination with the intricacies of brutality. At one
point, Alisak wishes he could witness a plane come
down just to learn how the bombs are stored.
As he demonstrated in his 2013 debut novel,
Snow Hunters, about a Korean War refugee who
tries to rebuild his life in Brazil, Yoon’s greatest skill
lies in crafting subtle moments that underline the
strange and specific sadness inherent to trauma.
Alisak reflects on his troubled childhood, when his
diminutive size made him a frequent target of vio-
lence, and reveals that he once swallowed a tooth
during a beating. “There were times this fact both-
ered him more than his own hunger or the sudden
volley of gunfire,” Yoon writes.
But Run Me to Earth is more than a narrative
of coming of age during wartime. The novel spans
decades, following the characters after an evacua-
tion sends them on radically different paths. As the
book flips between perspectives, each character is
catapulted back, time and again, to crushingly de-
tailed memories of their shared youth. Before they
FICTION
Land mines within
By Annabel Gutterman
A darker truth
What’s it like to be single when the
world reaches its expiration date? A
middle-aged divorcée in the last story of
Nicole Flattery’s electric debut collection
likens the experience of online dating
during the apocalypse to scheduling a
dentist appointment. To her, it feels like
“the same dim sense of obligation, the
same knowledge that a man
was going to examine her
and decide something was
horribly awry.”
Show Them a Good Time
features eight short stories
that deliver a familiar—but
decidedly darker—vision of
modern womanhood. In one,
a woman coping with grief
begins to grow a mysterioushump on her back. In another,
the girlfriend of a comedian
becomes frustrated by her
partner’s obsession with a
laugh track, which he plays
before bed to “improve” his
routine. And in the collection’s
most tragic tale, an author
looks back on a childhood
spent in swimming pools after
the death of her mother. One