While fleeing from their village, a Korean peasant farmer and his wife take in a wounded boy, an act of love that gives birth to an odd, unlikely family. By the author of The Chosen and My Name Is Asher Lev. 30,000 first printing. Editorial Reviews From Publishers Weekly Illuminating the horrors of war on a personal level--the hunger, the terror and the fatigue--this heart-wrenching novel will move readers to tears. more than once. Potok, brilliant chronicler of Hasidic life in such memorable novels as The Chosen and My Name Is Asher Lev, maps new terrain here, 'as' used below following the agonizing trek of an old Korean peasant couple as they leave their village in flight from the Chinese and "the fiends from the North" during the Korean conflict. In a drainage ditch on the side of the road, they find a seriously wounded boy. Although the old man tells his wife, "I have no wish for this child," Do you hear me, wom an?," she will not abandon the youngster. Slowly, as they nurse him back to health'nurse him back to health' suggests this , he is able to return the favor: protecting them from a pack of wild dogs, finding fish to eat, acquiring an ox. A deep believer in spirits and the good or bad fortune they bequeath according to whim, the old man gradually comes to accept this boy who has been so lucky for them. On their way to becoming a family, each of the trio grapples with personal demons and dreams of a past that cannot be reclaimed--the old man fighting to suppress his insatiable craving for meat caught in his strong, young hunting days, the old woman recalling her baby son who died in infancy and the boy struggling to accept that his entire family has been killed, his childhood village eradicated. In prose as spare and uncluttered as the simple lives it evokes, this deeply felt book leaves no doubt that even in the blighted landscape of war there is always room for luck, and love. Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. From School Library Journal YA-- As an old peasant couple flee the devastation of their Korean village, which has been invaded by the Chinese and the North Koreans, they find a young boy dying in a ditch. The woman, who has lost her own child, is overcome by a ferocious need to save the child. The man's equally strong instinct is for self-preservation. The wife's will is stronger; the child joins them, and ultimately makes himself indispensable to their survival. The story recounts the wartime perils that the threesome encounter; the tension between the old man and the boy; their individual memories, fears, and dreams; and the eventual inevitable separation. The book contains subtle, unobtrusive symbolism for those who wish to puzzle over the meaning of the Christian hymn of the title, the nomadic nature of the journey, the namelessness of the peasants, the rescue of the boy by a Jewish chaplain, and the mysticism of the old villager. Most readers however, will experience the story as a simple and powerful narrative of survival of the human spirit. - Jackie Gropman, Richard Byrd Library, Springfield, VA Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.