Snowglobe
Soyoung Park (translated by Joungmin Lee Comfort)
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 9780593484975
Delacorte Press, February 2024, 384 pages

Greetings, readers, and welcome back to another book review! This month we’re braving the frigid temperatures of a post-apocalyptic reality television surveillance state in Soyoung Park’s thrilling novel, Snowglobe (and if that description doesn’t immediately hook you, I don’t know what will (ahem US and UK readers)).

Snowglobe is the award-winning first novel of a duology by Soyoung Park, translated into English by Joungmin Lee Comfort, and my initial impression was that if Snowpiercer and The Jersey Shore had an abandoned baby, this is what it would look like, but this book is so much more than that. Set in a world where climate change has led to the entirety of Earth entering a new Ice Age except for a lone city enclosed by a glass dome, Snowglobe follows (for the most part) the journey of Jeon Chobahm, a teenage girl born and raised in the frigid wastelands surrounding the city of Snowglobe. Chobahm, who spends her days running on a human hamster wheel next to her mother to generate electricity in between genially feuding with her twin brother and taking care of her ailing grandmother (again, how are you not hooked yet, this all happens in the first chapter) shares a remarkable resemblance to Goh Haeri, Snowglobe’s idol ingenue beloved by survivors across the wastelands as a beacon of light and hope, her life televised and shared with everyone on a daily basis to distract from the everyday casual horror of survival.

Except Jeon Chobahm doesn’t want to be Goh Haeri (though she kinda does), she wants to be a director, one of the people responsible for shaping the stories of the actors living in Snowglobe.

—record scratch—

Yup, that’s right, to live in Snowglobe means you get all the best amenities in exchange for your (almost) every second belonging to everyone on the outside watching your lucky existence, and if you don’t like performing for the cameras, well, the ice and snow are always waiting, and there are always new actors waiting to take your place. After all, who can go back to living in the cold that kills when you’ve tasted the fresh air of a brisk sixty-nine degree day in casual athleisure wear, no matter whose backs it’s built on?

There is a lot more I want to say about Snowglobe‘s plot that I can’t say because spoilers are bad (both in universe and without), but one of the things that really stuck with me is how effortlessly Soyoung Park manages to weave together the story of a naive teenager searching for meaning in her life with overarching themes of the price of fame, the horror and weakness of an (almost) omnipresent surveillance state, what defines a person as an individual, and the abuses of power by those who can because they can (not to mention the subthemes of socialism and benefits/abuses thereof, the miseries of the prison-industrial complex, the grotesqueries of the manufactured idol identity, and the duality of public/private life, but I’m already running this sentence into an entire paragraph that my editor is going to shake her head at).

Needless to say, Soyoung Park is an incredibly gifted writer, and Joungmin Lee Comfort nails the translation in almost every way that matters. My only quibble was that there are a couple slightly awkward dialogue parts where it felt like the original idea simply didn’t fit what a normal English reader would expect based on setting/vernacular, but they were few and far between, and they never detracted from the larger messages of the story. Translator efforts aren’t always appreciated, but I want to take the space here to say that a book like this doesn’t reach other audiences without a dedicated effort that can be just as difficult as writing the story in the first place, and I appreciate how well it was accomplished.

Overall, Snowglobe was never quite what I expected in all the best ways that matter, and I think it’s worth reading not just because it’s an entertaining story in its own right, but also because it has a lot of meaningful things to say about global culture that transcend any sort of language barrier. I’m highly anticipating the second book’s translation, hopefully translated once again by Joungmin Lee Comfort, and I will happily read anything else Soyoung Park decides to write.

Read if: You know what it means to have the cold take your breath away; you’re curious what actually goes on behind the camera; you’d sacrifice what’s comfortable for what’s right.