If you're a ratings person I guess technically this would be a 3.75 book but I bumper it up a little because I truly haven't read anything like this before. I feel like I say that way too often but really mean it this time. I feel like I had the appropriate expectations for this book but still it was unique and surprising. There's actually a lot to unpack here but I don't have the words to do it at the moment. 

TL;DR: wasn't a perfect read but I can't stop thinking about it 

Overall I thought this book had a lot of interesting things to say about the tourism industry and human impact on the environment, and there were a lot of descriptions in this book that were honestly, with no other way to describe it, really delicious to read. I do wish that some of the concepts could've been explore a little deeper, since there was so much to unpack in this book but overall I had a great time.

 The Disaster Tourist by Yun Ko-eun 💣
🌟🌟🌟✨

🏖️ The plot: Yona Ko is a programme designer at Jungle, a tourism agency for people who want to visit disaster sites. Every day she sifts through the worst news the world has to offer to put together travel packages. Burnt out by her job and by sexual harassment from her boss, she accepts the chance to go on a trip herself to Mui, a small island that was the site of a massacre in the 1960s. But when a minor disaster of her own causes her to overstay her original itinerary, Yona realises there could be a bigger one on the horizon...

The Disaster Tourist is a novel that is very interested in the idea of responsibility and the individual versus the collective. Yona is an isolated character at the beginning, committed to the collective security of the company she works for and unable to break rank, even when it appears that her employer is turning on her. This only intensifies as she gets stranded in Mui, but eventually Yona realises how dangerous following orders can be, how little safety it earns you from a higher authority that sees you only as a resource. I really felt the bind Yona was in throughout, how scary it is to strike out individually or take responsibility for your actions when so much of your life relies on the system you're rejecting.

That said, I found this a really odd read! The first half of the novel felt like a report of a pretty crap holiday, and it wasn't until things started to unravel halfway through that I was really hooked. I think this must have been a tough one to translate, so I wonder if the matter-of-fact prose was partly the issue? Overall I found this very thought-provoking and quite well-crafted by the end, but not super readable!

🏖️ Read it if you like novels that explore the way work culture affects the broader themes of our lives, and novels that definitely don't romanticise travel. This is a pretty cynical book!

🚫 Avoid it if you're not feeling in the mood for a nihilistic novel! This book does not have a happy ending!!