The Color of the Sky Is the Shape of the Heart

The story of a one-girl revolution that broke literary ground in Japan—now in English translation for the first time.

Seventeen-year-old Ginny Park is about to get expelled from high school—again. Stephanie, the picture book author who took Ginny into her Oregon home after she was kicked out of school in Hawaii, isn’t upset: she only wants to know why.

But Ginny has always been in-between. She can’t bring herself to open up toanyone about her past, or about what prompted her to flee her native Japan.

Then, Ginny finds a mysterious scrawl among Stephanie’s scraps of paper and storybook drawings that changes everything: The sky is about to fall. Where do you go?

Ginny sets off on the road in search of an answer, with only her journal as a confidante. In witty and brutally honest vignettes, and interspersed with old letters from her expatriated family in North Korea, Ginny recounts her adolescence growing up Zainichi, an ethnic Korean born in Japan, and the incident that forced her to leave years prior.

Inspired by her own childhood, author Chesil creates a portrait of a girl who has been fighting alone against barriers of prejudice, nationality, and injustice all her life—and one searching for a place to belong.

© 2022 Recorded Books (Audiobook): 9781705072035

Translators: Takami Nieda

Release date

Audiobook: 14 June 2022