Review of City of Night Birds by Juhea Kim

*City of Night Birds* by Juhea Kim (2024). Published by Ecco.

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

I recently fell into a spell of unemployment probably during the worst time to be unemployed, as it was very hard to find a job. I was applying to hundreds of jobs, getting interviews, but no offer was manifesting for me in the near future. So during this time, I had a lot of free time, and spent a good chunk of it chipping away at the blog.

As a book blogger, something I’ve always been super clear about and dedicated towards promoting are local libraries. I know having access to a good library is a privilege, and there are countries where people don’t really have access to books at all. I am so grateful every day that I have access to a decent library system, especially in today’s world.

I was in my local library branch, in the new fiction section, when I stumbled upon their last copy of City of Night Birds. I’d been wanting to read this book because I loved Juhea Kim’s other novel, her debut Beasts of a Little Land, but hadn’t gotten around to finding a copy and sitting down to read it. I checked out this copy in hopes I would get to it soon, and I ended up reading it while on a trip to visit relatives in Philadelphia.

It was a fairly quick read, especially when I had nothing to do while my elderly relatives watched television. It also helped that I was quite invested in this book!

Let’s get into the review before I ramble too much.

A Russian ballerina finds her break in France, but faces a career ending injury.

This novel is about Natalia Leonova, a Russian ballerina who was put into the competitive ecosystem of dance when she was a young girl by her mother. We learn more about Natalia and her mother throughout the course of the novel, as they don’t have the best relationship with each other, much to her regret and chagrin later on in the novel.

Natalia was quite talented and rose through the ranks of the St. Petersburg dance scene, working her way up to the upper echelons of the Russian dance world. It’s there she comes into contact with Alexander, who will become the love of her life.

But there’s friction with someone else in the Moscow ballet company: Dimitri. He is the star of the show, and he’s willing to do whatever it takes to cement his status and legacy within Russian ballet, even if it means that he turns away someone he loves or cares for.

And as we know from the dance world, no matter how talented you are, if you can’t get along with the politics and the leaders of a company, you’re not going to get anywhere. So when Natalia is offered a chance with the French ballet in Paris, she demands that she can take Alexander with her.

Off they go to Paris, where their lives completely change compared to Moscow. Natalia becomes one of the most famous ballerinas on the planet, and Alexander rises in fame along with her as they are a super couple in this world. While they were living in squalor before, they now have money and riches, the world seemingly at their fingertips.

But when Alexander makes one pro-Russian political comment, it can all easily come crashing down for them both. Then Natalia uncovers an awful secret and gets into an accident that seemingly ends her career. Two years later, though, Dimitri comes back for her despite the negative feelings they had for each other before.

He wants her to star in the role she once was famous for before the accident, and it would be her grand return to the stage. Suddenly Natalia has to grapple with everything that’s happened in her life, including those she left behind, whether it was on purpose or not.

Overall Thoughts

I find Juhea Kim to be such a brilliant writer, and the details are what makes this book really come alive. It’s something as small as the way a body moves, or something on the street, that makes this prose really come alive. I wish one day I could write prose as beautiful as Kim writes it.

While I did enjoy reading the novel and that experience, I feel like I didn’t care as much for the plot itself. I found the characters and Natalia’s situation to be interesting and compelling, but I did not connect to any of the characters emotionally. I was interested in her story, but the way things happened were not within my usual taste for plot/books.

I do think someone else out there is definitely going to love this book for the plot, if not the writing alone. You really are dropped into the world of its characters throughout its story, and I will admit I kept reading through it with interest on what happened next. It just wasn’t my cup of tea for hold things went down, which is fine.

So go pick it out if you’re interested in the plot or setting! Pick it up at your local library or indie bookstore for sure—you might find it very worth reading.

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