★The copyrights of simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese have been sold!
★The best-selling classic of the past 20 years & A legendary novel that has sold over 300,000 copies!
★Hailed as “The Enlightening Work of Korean Youth Literature”.
★Nominated for the 2024 International Hans Christian Andersen Award, children's and young adult literature promoter, Lee Geum-yi, addresses the issues of child sexual abuse and teenage trauma.
★Adapted into a Korean stage play.

With shadows of unfortunate childhood and very different backgrounds, two young girls with the same name meet.
Together they face the restlessness of youth and the pain of growing up.

Don’t blame girls in adolescence for being unpredictable, we’re just hurt and more sensitive...

Two girls with the same name meet in the same class. The teachers and students call them ‘Yu Jin Senior’ and ‘Yu Jin Junior’ due to their height difference. One is a petite and cool girl who is the top student in the school, while the other is cheerful and honest. They were classmates in kindergarten, and they had a shared tragic experience. After growing up in different education backgrounds, they meet again. Both girls are victims of their past, trapped by their flashbacks. They share a desire for freedom and love, and face the challenges of adolescence and the shadows of their childhood. They have transformed from rejection and resistance to acceptance and mutual support, and they understand each other’s unseen struggles…

‘Yu Jin and Yu Jin’, Lee’s first novel for young adults, is considered her masterpiece. It was published in Korea in 2004 and received a huge response for its treatment of sensitive social issues such as sexual violence against children, bullying, and trauma in adolescent development. Over the past 20 years, Lee has comforted countless confused teenagers and children: “Even if you fall down heavily, you can still fly high again.”

Lee Geum-yi
Born in 1962 in Cheongwon County, Chungbuk and raised in Seoul, she is a renowned Korean writer of children’s and young adult literature. As a child, she lived with her grandmother, a good storyteller, and was fascinated by stories from a very early age. She dreamed of becoming a writer while reading the entire collection of world literature.
In 1984, she won the New Friends Literary Award for her short fairy tale ‘Yeong gu and heuk gu’, which launched her career as a writer. She then published a series of works that led to the explosive growth of Korean children's literature in the 1990s and 2000s, and at the same time promoted the emergence of Korean young adult literature, firmly drawing the attention of Korean readers and literary critics. In 2004, she published ‘Yu Jin and Yu Jin’ , a novel that contains themes that resonate with teenagers’ growth and pain, and has been described as the starting point of Korean young adult literature. In the 20 years since its publication, the novel has been reprinted and has sold more than 300,000 copies, and has been rewritten into a musical, which has been a favorite not only among teenage readers, but also among children.
She once said, “I didn’t choose children’s literature, but children’s literature chose me”. In 2020, she was officially nominated for the International Hans Christian Andersen Award, the most prestigious award in the world for children’s and young people’s literature, and this year she was shortlisted again for the same 2024 Award.