‘Banned Book Club’ is the Daring Memoir That Comes Once A Generation

Banned Book Club from Iron Circus Comics caught my eye from the beginning. I love reading about places I’ve never been, about historical events involving folks people who don’t look like me, speak the same language as me or worship the same way I do. I love comics from the Asian diaspora, especially manwha. Banned Book Club presents the true story of a South Korean woman’s student days in college in the early 1980s. Under an authoritarian regime she found — through the rebellion of reading — her purpose and learned how powerful a tool censorship can be.

Yearning For Change Banned Book Club opens on Kim Hyun Sook who starts college in South Korea back in 1983. She’s a headstrong young woman who constantly butts heads with her much more traditional mother, who isn’t even fully onboard with her daughter going to college. But Kim is a determined girl who is ready for her life to change and for her world to start to open up. College will the be catalyst for that and she’s been ready. For two years, while working at her family’s restaurant, she saved up her own money working another job and applied for school in secret to make it happen. With a love of reading in her heart, she leaves home and jumps on a bus to her university to study Western Literature…she’s ready to be the captain of her own ship. The first steps off the bus, she finds herself smack in the middle of a student protest. The protest outside the university’s gates is complete with Molotov cocktails, riot gear …