A lot of the book is taken up by sentences like, “Sprout was hungry,” or “Sprout was astonished.” I got a little bored with Sprout and thought she seemed a dense at times, and I judged her for putting the whole meaning of her life on her chick and then feeling deserted and lifeless when he grew up. Proponents might call it “spare prose,” but to me it felt overly simplified, and repeated ideas as if I might not have understood them the first time they were said. The story’s not bad, but the style was hard for me to cope with. When she escapes from her cage, Sprout realizes freedom is more complicated to achieve and harder to maintain than she had first thought, and motherhood brings its own challenges. It’s the story of a laying hen in captivity who longs for simple things- sunlight and a chick to raise. Review snippets in the front compared it to Charlotte’s Web. I was excited about this book- it had a beautiful cover and illustrations (by Nomoco), and was advertised as a Korean fable, a genre-name that brought to mind some lovely books like The Little Prince and The Alchemist. – from The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly, by Sun-mi Hwang, translated by Chi-Young Kim “She fantasized about sitting in a nest, on an egg, about venturing into the fields with the rooster, and about following the ducks around.
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