Book Review: The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story by Hyeonseo Lee
The Girl with Seven Names by Hyeonseo Lee delivers a courageous, haunting, and unforgettable memoir of survival, identity, and resilience. From the very first page, Lee’s story grips the reader — not only because of the extraordinary risks she took to escape North Korea, but because of the quiet, deeply human moments she shares along the way: the ache of separation, the constant fear of discovery, and the bittersweet taste of freedom.
Lee’s voice is clear, honest, and deeply compelling, even when recounting unthinkable hardships. Rather than sensationalizing her experiences, she invites readers to witness the slow erosion of trust and hope under an oppressive regime, and the breathtaking will it takes to reclaim one’s life and dignity. Her descriptions of life in North Korea — the casual brutalities, the carefully rationed joys, the heavy cloud of constant surveillance — are vivid and humanizing, offering a rare and necessary window into a world few outsiders truly understand.
But what makes The Girl with Seven Names so profoundly moving is not only the journey of physical escape. It is also the emotional odyssey: the years Lee spends forging a new identity, battling loneliness, guilt, and the aching longing for the family she left behind. Her eventual efforts to rescue her loved ones from North Korea are some of the most harrowing and inspiring parts of the memoir.
Professional in its craft yet deeply emotional in its impact, Lee’s memoir reminds us of the human cost of political division and the extraordinary strength it takes to defy even the darkest circumstances. The Girl with Seven Names is essential reading for anyone who believes in the power of courage, hope, and love.
Check out all my reviews of North Korean Defector Memoirs here.
My Review
An extraordinary insight into life under one of the world’s most ruthless and secretive dictatorships – and the story of one woman’s terrifying struggle to avoid capture/repatriation and guide her family to freedom.
As a child growing up in North Korea, Hyeonseo Lee was one of millions trapped by a secretive and brutal communist regime. Her home on the border with China gave her some exposure to the world beyond the confines of the Hermit Kingdom and, as the famine of the 1990s struck, she began to wonder, question and to realise that she had been brainwashed her entire life. Given the repression, poverty and starvation she witnessed surely her country could not be, as she had been told “the best on the planet”?
Aged seventeen, she decided to escape North Korea. She could not have imagined that it would be twelve years before she was reunited with her family.
