John Choi

What gives this book a distinctly different depth from other coming-of-age novels is author John Choi’s unique background. Long before he was a novelist, he was a veteran child and youth mental health professional who worked in Toronto for over 20 years. Over the past two decades, he has met countless children from immigrant families in his counseling room. Closer than anyone, he has witnessed the tears of children burdened by the guilt of failing to meet their parents' expectations, the scars of racial discrimination, and a depression they could not confide to anyone. Dark Side is the result of pouring the stories of the countless "Emersons" he witnessed in his clinic into the vessel of literature. Therefore, the sentences in this novel read less like fiction and more like a painful testimony of reality. (Interestingly, he is also the younger brother of Ann Y. K. Choi, who wrote All Things Under the Moon. The fact that these siblings both studied creative writing at the University of Toronto and are recording the stories of the Korean community in their own ways is a proud detail demonstrating how much our community's cultural potential has grown.)