A Single Shard Study Guide

Linda Sue Park was born in Urbana, Illinois in 1960 to Korean immigrant parents. She began writing both stories and poetry at a young age. She has received a BA in English Literature from Stanford University, where she studied writing; a Higher Diploma in Anglo-Irish Literature from Trinity College (in Dublin, Ireland); and an MA in Modern British Literature from the University of London. Her first novel, Seesaw Girl, was published in 1999; it is a work of historical fiction for children set in 17th-century Korea. Her third novel, A Single Shard (2001) won the Newbery Award, a prestigious honor for children’s fiction, in 2002. Her most recent novel, Prairie Lotus (2020), centers around a half-Asian girl dealing with racial prejudice in the 19th-century United States. Linda Sue Park has written more than a dozen novels for children, as well as a number of picture books and poems. She currently lives in Rochester, New York.

A Single Shard is set in 12th-century Korea and depicts the making of celadon ware, a kind of pottery glazed with a particular gray-green glaze. Though historians believe that celadon originated in China, it subsequently traveled to Korea, where it became the main kind of pottery produced during the Goryeo dynasty (918–1392), which united the whole Korean peninsula into a single kingdom. As such, though the term “Goryeo ware” can refer to any pottery produced during the Goryeo dynasty, it usually refers to celadon ware and is sometimes used as another name for Korean celadon ware. A Single Shard also fictionalizes the creation of the sanggam technique, a kind of “inlay work” that was pioneered in Korea during the Goryeo dynasty, in which potters incise their pots with grooves that they then fill with colored “slip” (liquid clay) to create painted designs level with the surface of the ceramics. Finally, A Single Shard gives an implied fictional account of the creation of the “Thousand Cranes” vase, a famous real-life work of inlaid celadon ware from 12th-century Korea: the novel implies that its protagonist, Tree-ear, eventually created the “Thousand Cranes” vase to pay tribute to his dead friend and guardian Crane-man.

In Linda Sue Park’s Newbery Award acceptance speech for A Single Shard, she mentioned several disparate literary works that inspired the novel. Tree-ear’s difficult journey through mountainous forest was inspired by Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet (1987), a young-adult survival novel about a boy who has to survive in the wilderness after his plane crash-lands. Orphaned, ostracized Tree-ear’s labor to become a master potter was inspired by Elizabeth Borton de Treviño’s I, Juan de Pareja (1965), another Newbery Award winner, whose protagonist is an enslaved boy who wins his freedom and becomes a talented painter. Finally, Simon Winchester’s Korea: A Walk through the Land of Miracles (1988), a nonfiction work about traveling in Korea, helped Linda Sue Park describe Tree-ear’s journey through Korea despite not having walked the route herself. A Single Shard is a work of historical fiction for children set in Korea; Linda Sue Park has written several other historical novels for children set in Korea, including Seesaw Girl (1999), set in 17th-century Korea; The Kite Fighters (2000), set in 15th-century Korea; and When My Name Was Keoko (2002), set in Korea during World War II (1939–1945).