A review by winnimartha
Fortune Smiles by Adam Johnson

5.0

In Fortune Smiles, Adam Johnson drops us into the lives of unexpected characters and unique perspectives, from a cancer patient to a child porn addict to North Korean defectors. The results are unsettling and morally ambiguous. Each story portrays some kind of dystopian future or after-world, on differing scales (natural disaster, assassination, defection). Some kind of event has upended everything, and the characters are left trying to re-find themselves, embracing new futures, or holding onto the past, or something in between. As we saw with The Orphan Master's Son, Johnson really knows how to tell a story.