When a Rooster Crows at Night: a Child's Experience of the Korean War

One night in June 1950, nine-year-old Jong-ah's rooster crows for no apparent reason. In her horror, she discovers the next morning that her mother has served up the bird as breakfast soup, for in Korea, a rooster crowing at night is a bad omen. Later that day the news of North Korea's surprise attack on the South reaches her hometown Pusan. Through the eyes of a young, inquisitive protagonist, the novel follows the three-year-long war that devours half of South Korea, billions of American dollars, and more than a million lives, including 54,000 Americans. As the story weaves through the narrator's comfortable home in Pusan to the mountains shrouded in Buddhist mysticism and then to the island of Cheju, where she becomes a temporary orphan, readers not only feel for the people in a war-raging country, but also hear a child's lively voice capturing the humor and mystery of everyday life.