Imagine a dome, and inside the dome is a world unlike the harsh and unforgiving one that you belong to. Inside, a society flourishes, their homes untampered by the unending arctic winds and subzero temperatures outside.
The people outside the dome know this world because they see it on TV. The lives of the people within make up the broadcast material of the everyday laborer’s entertainment, and in these fantasies do they find their escape. One day, they believe, they can also enter the dome and leave the hell of the outside world behind.
Such is the premise of Soyoung Park’s “Snowglobe,” the start of a new YA duology that focuses its critiques on today’s celebrity culture and media consumption patterns, under the light of looming concerns over climate change and the growing inequities in wealth and resources. A young woman named Chobahm is our protagonist, and she is fascinated by the lives of the people living in the eponymous Snowglobe. One day, she is granted the opportunity of a lifetime: One of Snowglobe’s brightest stars, Haeri, is dead, and she is picked to masquerade as Haeri in her stead, on account of their identical features. On the advice of the shadowy Director Cha, the show must go on.
In her new role, Chobahm takes her first ever foray into the dome, and learns that there are an endless tangle of secrets for her to uncover, secrets so heavy that they could unravel the foundations of Snowglobe itself, and unearth the lives Chobahm once only knew from the pale glow of a TV screen.
The framing of Snowglobe’s society makes for interesting grounds to explore how our society engages with media, and how the entertainment we consume and demand is intertwined with the lives of real people like us. Chobahm struggles with accepting the fact of Haeri’s death as she acts her way across rooms and streets that she used to watch the real Haeri navigate on TV. Yet, she knows that keeping the illusion of Haeri alive is shielding viewers from facing the devastating truth that she herself knows, allowing them to continue having their parasocial relationship to the person they’re attached to. But as she continues to notice strange incongruities in the supposedly perfect lives of the Snowglobe residents, she begins the process of interrogating her own attachments to these people, and what it would mean to reevaluate said relationships.
Another theme that Park explores with a deft and insightful edge is the severity of impact that the climate crisis can have on every facet of society, particularly in regards to how it can exacerbate the resources gap between the exorbitantly wealthy and the rest of the world’s citizens. Only a small minority get to live in Snowglobe, and the labor of the people outside powers the engines that keep the dome going. Part of Chobahm’s investigation into Snowglobe involves learning harsh histories that show that in the advent of apocalyptic circumstances, those who were at the top will continue doing everything to establish systems that maintain their power.
Chobahm makes for an arresting perspective, her journey being recounted in first-person point of view gives a true feeling of being an outsider staring wide-eyed at the surreal world inside Snowglobe. If there are any areas for improvement with this otherwise captivating start to Park’s duology, it would be the relatively under-focus on the supporting cast. While a point can be made about whether the wider villain of the novel is truly one person or rather several societal forces, its focal point antagonist, Director Cha, is rather shallow as she continues to bump up against Chobahm, impeding the young woman from ripping away the mask off Snowglobe’s facade entirely. Bonwhe, another famous resident of Snowglobe, who is teased to have an interesting backstory with the real Haeri, is promising — but just that. Hopefully both him and several other characters that satellite around Chobahm are expounded on in the sequel.
“Snowglobe” is certainly timely. Tapping into the often toxic polarities of modern-day media to make a point about how everyday life can be warped beyond true sustainability, Soyoung Park writes not only an entertaining mystery, but also an ominous wake-up call.
