Human rights activist Yeonmi Park, who fled North Korea with her mother in 2007 at the tender age of 13, shares her harrowing journey to freedom. Her escape led her to South Korea two years later, following a grueling ordeal. To be completely free, Yeonmi realized she had to confront the truth of her past and share her story.

Her narrative unveils an ugly, shameful story of being sold with her mother into slave marriages by Chinese brokers. Initially, she tried to conceal these painful details while blending into South Korean society. However, she soon recognized the power of her survival story to inspire others. Her journey also includes the quest to find her sister, who had escaped earlier and vanished into China for years.

Northern California, during the violent end of the 1960s. At the start of summer, a lonely and thoughtful teenager, Evie Boyd, sees a group of girls in the park, and is immediately caught by their freedom, their careless dress, their dangerous aura of abandon.

Soon, Evie is in thrall to Suzanne, a mesmerizing older girl, and is drawn into the circle of a soon-to-be infamous cult and the man who is its charismatic leader. Hidden in the hills, their sprawling ranch is eerie and run down, but to Evie, it is exotic, thrilling, and charged—a place where she feels desperate to be accepted.

As she spends more time away from her mother and the rhythms of her daily life, and as her obsession with Suzanne intensifies, Evie does not realize she is coming closer and closer to unthinkable violence.

The Girls is a spellbinding and arresting coming-of-age story that paints an indelible portrait of girls, and the women they become, during a time when everything can go horribly wrong.

The day my mother was killed, she told my father I wouldn't speak again, and she told him if I died, he would die too. Then she predicted the king would trade his soul and lose his son to the sky.

My father has a claim to the throne, and he is waiting in the shadows for all of my mother's words to come to pass. He wants desperately to be king, and I just want to be free.

But freedom will require escape, and I'm a prisoner of my mother's curse and my father's greed. I can't speak or make a sound, and I can't wield a sword or beguile a king. In a land purged of enchantment, love might be the only magic left, and who could ever love ... a bird?"--Back cover.