Book Review: A Single Shard

"A Single Shard" by Linda Sue Park is about an orphan named Tree-ear who lives with Crane-Man, an old, homeless widower who took Tree-ear in when an epidemic raged through the monasteries', who could not keep Tree-ear in fear of contaminating him. The setting of this story is in a twelfth-century Korean potters' village Ch'ulp'o. Tree-ear was content to live with Crane-man under a bridge, barely surviving on a few scraps of food. All of that changed, though when he saw a master potter named Min make his stunning pottery. Tree-ear longed to make his pots as good as Min's one day. …