When Banned Book Club, a YA graphic novel-memoir by Kim Hyun Sook, Kp Hyung-Ju, and Ryan Estrada appeared in 2020, it gained widespread attention for its account of a provincial first-year university student in South Korea 1983 who learns about her country’s dictatorship and the freedom struggle when she joins a traditional dance team and its spinoff banned book club. No Rules Tonight, by Kim and Estrada, is a sequel to that much acclaimed (and in the U.S., oft-banned) first book.

The title refers to Christmas Eve, the one night that had no curfew under the dictatorship. Although the military rulers had suspended the curfew by 1984, when this story takes place, books and other media are heavily censored and protests are banned. Hoon, who introduced Hyun Sook to banned books and the democracy struggle, is graduating soon and has asked Hyun Sook to take over leadership of the Banned Book Club, but she’s afraid. And on Christmas Eve, their traditional dance team has planned a mountain retreat but Hoon, who’s organizing what they need to take to the unheated cottage, has just been arrested on the street for no clear reason. Without his organizational skills, the other members of the team are woefully unprepared. And loads of drama await them. The stage manager, Suji, is looking forward to seeing Yuni, who graduated the previous spring; Suji plans to confess her love for Yuni but doesn’t know if Yuni is even gay like she is. Hyun Sook has brought the book she’s supposed to present to the Banned Book Club, but one of the new members of the team is always following her around. Could he be a spy, one of the “proxies” that the regime hires to infiltrate student organizations and report to the police? Then, trying to hide her book, she gets lost in the woods.

Budding romances, interpersonal conflicts, and an unrelenting nature take center stage in this fast-paced and humorous story that features bright full-color illustrations (in contrast to the black-and-white art of Banned Book Club). Politics serve more as a backdrop, but none of these problems would have happened had the teenagers not have had to seek a measure of privacy and freedom in the snowy mountains far from civilization, and if the coordinator of their trip not been pinched off the street by police. In No Rules Tonight, readers will learn what life is like in a despotic regime and the lengths young people will go to in order to find freedom – and in the process, find themselves.

No Rules Tonight

Written and illustrated by Kim Hyun Sook and Ryan Estrada

Penguin Workshop, 2024

ISBN 978-0-593-52130-4 (pb)

Reviews

School Library Journal

Kirkus

Publishers Weekly

Shelf Awareness

Awards

2024 CYBILS Finalist, YA Graphic Novels

You can buy a copy of No Rules Tonight here or find it in a library here.

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Lyn Miller-Lachmann is the author of the YA historical novel Torch (Carolrhoda Lab, 2022), winner of the 2023 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Young Adult Literature and a 2022 Booklist Editors’ Choice, and the YA verse novel Eyes Open (Carolrhoda Lab 2024), chosen by Booklist as a Top 10 Historical Fiction for Youth, 2024. She wrote the picture book Ways to Play (Levine Querido, 2023), illustrated by Gabriel Alborozo, and co-authored with Zetta Elliott the middle grade verse novel Moonwalking (FSG, 2022). Her nonfiction includes a biography of Temple Grandin in the She Persisted chapter book series from Philomel and Film Makers: 15 Groundbreaking Women Directors (co-authored with Tanisia “Tee” Moore) from Chicago Review Press. She translates books for youth from Portuguese to English, including the 2023 YA graphic novel Pardalita by Joana Estrela, published by Levine Querido, which was named a Batchelder Honor Book in 2024 and the graphic novel Our Beautiful Darkness (Enchanted Lion), by the Angolan author Ondjaki, illustrated by António Jorge Gonçalves.