Review of The Red Palace by June Hur
The Red Palace (Feiwel and Friends, 2022) is the second of June Hur’s historical fiction young adult mystery novels set in Korea that I have read and enjoyed. This book, set in the mid-eighteenth century, again features wonderful characters and a great mystery. And while you might guess the culprit earlier in this book than in The Silence of Bones, the “why” of the mystery may still come as a surprise.
Hyeon, the illegitimate daughter of a nobleman and one of his concubines, has worked hard to train as a nurse and has seen her studies prove fruitful with a position as a palace nurse. But when she and another nurse are called to assist a physician with the Crown Prince, they find that not everything is as it seems, and that their work in the palace may prove dangerous to them both, especially after some of their fellow nurses are murdered and their former teacher blamed. There are levels of palace intrigue, an investigator who prefers what is expeditious over what is true, and a burgeoning romance between Hyeon and a young police inspector.
Again, I really loved the main character Hyeon and her personal and professional struggles, but the entire cast is a delight. Where The Red Palace differs from The Silence of Bones is that it brings in actual members of the royal family as characters in the story. Most of them are kept at a bit of a remove from the main action, but Hur also did significant research so as to bring these characters to life faithfully and carefully.
If you read and liked The Silence of Bones on my recommendation, you’ll likely enjoy The Red Palace just as much, if not moreso! I still need to read Hur’s other book, The Forest of Stolen Girls, which has similar elements to these two books but is set in the fifteenth century. I can’t get enough of these interesting mysteries in historical settings!
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