At the young age of 13, Yenomi had no concept of the freedom she and her mother were risking their lives for. “I didn’t even know the word. I didn’t know the concept.” says Yenomi, the author of In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom.”I never heard of that word ‘freedom’. To me, the happiest thing was having food.”
Yenomi’s compelling story starts when she and her mother leave North Korea to search for her missing sister and their own freedom. They leave late at night to cross the frozen Yalu river on March 31, 2007. Although out of North Korea, Yenomi then goes on to face perversion, exploitation, and starvation. Yenomi’s terrifying journey would then take through China, and the gobi desert before she would make it into