"This arrow-like novel of love does not stick in the target but moves forward forever."
– Recommended by Kim Seo-hae, author of Summer Is Just a Season

Matchmaking success rate 0%. The last mission of the lowest-ranked Cupid.
Shoot pink love into a frozen heart!

Author Choi Yang-sun, who draws a ray of light from deep within a heart stained with sorrow, has published her full-length novel Shoot Love. The protagonist, "Cudy," is a Cupid by profession. Armed with arrows of love, Cudy roams the human world, seeking to capture the flickering embers of love in people's hearts. However, for seven years, Cudy has never once shot an arrow. Even when witnessing the faintest hint of mutual affection, Cudy hesitates, wondering, "Isn't that light just temporary?" or "Is that pattern suitable for an arrow?" Cudy agonizes over what love is, constantly questioning, and ultimately lowers the bow. Having been at the bottom of the rankings since becoming a Cupid, Cudy is eventually summoned by the superior. The superior, seeing that Cudy does not understand love, assigns a particularly difficult target.

Cudy's new target is a 26-year-old office worker named Park Shin-jo. Cudy follows Shin-jo all day long, investigating her background. However, Shin-jo is someone who "has no friends she meets, exchanges no ordinary phone calls or text messages, and spends most of her time alone" (p. 46). Cudy gets a hint from elite colleague "Cuo" and finds Shin-jo's book in the 'Life Library,' where the lives of living people are recorded in real-time. The life of the positive and bright girl Shin-jo began to change at the end of her nineteenth year. Now, at twenty-six, she pushes away everyone who approaches and has locked herself within walls. But that doesn't mean the light of love has completely vanished from Shin-jo's heart. When she meets the stray cats she feeds, a cat-shaped light flickers, and she sometimes looks at her kind senior colleague, Chanyoung, with longing eyes. In photos, they looked happy like an ordinary couple.

Meanwhile, Shin-jo also has memories of Gi-woo, who lived next door during her school days. The two always treated each other affectionately amidst a subtle tension. Cudy gauges the unbridgeable distance between Shin-jo, Chanyoung, and Gi-woo, deliberating which way to aim the arrow. Finally, on Shin-jo's birthday, she receives a call from Gi-woo and goes to meet him, and a light blooms in Shin-jo's heart. Seeing the same color of light rise in Gi-woo's heart, Cudy draws an arrow and pulls the bowstring with all its might. Suddenly, Cudy feels an intense pain, but the arrow leaves the string. At that moment, a thick, solid shield rises in Shin-jo's heart. Cudy's arrow is deflected and shatters into pieces...

"From now on, I won't love anyone."

Though painful enough to want to forget, time and again the heart drifts back to that person—
Countless moments of love.

Cupids shoot arrows to connect love. A bow and arrows are tools used for hunting or harming others. Being hit by an arrow means enduring painful agony and may even lead to death. So why did an arrow become the object that connects love?

I thought it was because love entails pain. (...) Perhaps the greatest pain of love is when we are forced to confront a self we want to reject. At the same time, I believe we grow when pain shines as beauty. (pp. 333–334, from the "Author's Note")

The novel borrows the gaze of a failed love-connector—a Cupid—to calmly observe the pain of feeling "worn down and frayed," of "not filling each other up but gnawing at each other until tattered" (p. 145). In the story, Gi-woo is Shin-jo's childhood friend and first love. He was once someone she "couldn't bear to go a single day without seeing or hearing" (p. 147). But as time together deepened, so did the accumulated wounds, and "at some point, even the moments spent together became unbearable." In contrast, Chanyoung appears when Shin-jo's wounds are beginning to heal. Their relationship grows "with caution proportionate to their growing feelings" (p. 119). Each person's past is diluted by the flow of time—"the strongest healing power" (p. 125)—and shared only to the extent that they need not reveal their raw selves. Shin-jo, facing the pain of two different kinds of love, slowly moves forward. For those who vow "never to love again" (p. 146) yet ultimately unlock their hearts, the novel offers comfort, like new flesh growing over the spot where an arrow once passed.

Choi Yang-sun studied literary creative writing at university. She began her writing career by winning the Munhakdongne Children's Literature Award for her full-length children's novel Monster Virus City. In 2011, she received the Grand Prize in the creative writing category of the 16th Changbi "Good Children's Book" manuscript contest for The Village Not on the Map. Her other books include Stars, Cats, and Us, The Future of Dragons, and The Boy Who Crossed the Night.