The premise for Snowglobe sounds like something from a random story prompt generator: a nuclear winter, an entire population running on giant hamster wheels to generate power, a privileged elite class whose lives are broadcasted as individual reality shows, and a celebrity with a doppelganger. It’s Snowpiercer, Black Mirror, Terrace House, and Us by way of a K-Drama-ish plot.

What’s important, though, is that Soyoung Park does a fantastic job of weaving this eclectic collection of themes together into a story that is fun and thrilling, with just a dash of social commentary.

It is a couple hundred years into the aftermath of the last world war, and most of humanity lives in a perpetually frozen hellscape—the last places on the planet that are still inhabitable by human standards. Most people work at their city’s power plant, where the energy they produce by running in the aforementioned giant hamster wheels provide the electricity they need to stay alive.

For a select few, though, life is different.

Snowglobe is a city encased in a giant dome. Inside, it’s nice and warm. People live lives not too different from our contemporary experience, where every day isn’t a struggle to survive. In Snowglobe, people are comfortable and safe. Most of the power generated by the plants go towards keeping Snowglobe warm and bright.

In return, though, every inhabitant in Snowglobe is an actor who participates in a TV show. Footage is collected via countless hidden cameras positioned all throughout the city, and directors edit this footage to form narratives designed to entertain the masses. The shows are streamed to everyone on the planet, and there’s something for everyone in all sorts of genres.

It’s a high aspiration to want to become an actor. Auditions are regularly held among the inhabitants of the outside world. It’s a higher aspiration still to want to be a director—an elite role that commands much power and respect.

For Jeon Chobahm, becoming a director is the end goal—a ticket from frozen poverty for her and her family. She gets her chance soon enough when a director from Snowglobe pays her a visit and offers her a deal: Goh Haeri, the star of Chobahm’s favorite show, has committed suicide. Chobahm, inexplicably, looks just like Goh Haeri. If she agrees to take Haeri’s place in The Goh Haeri Show, the director promises to get her admitted into Snowglobe’s film academy.

Soon, Chobahm is whisked off to Snowglobe to live Haeri’s life, and the story becomes many things. Snowglobe is a mystery: Chobahm soon finds out that things in Snowglobe are not as bright as they seemed from the outside, and she is drawn into the mystery of Haeri’s suicide and the general dystopia of Snowglobe itself.

Snowglobe is also, as trite as it may sound, a mirror held up to society: a satirical look into our own obsession with the concepts of celebrity, privilege, and power. Snowglobe is a story about family: Chobahm’s family, Haeri’s family, and also the family that rules Snowglobe: the Yibonn Media Group.

It shouldn’t be overlooked, though, that Snowglobe is also a very entertaining adventure story from start to finish. Chobahm, with her courage and grit, makes for a strong protagonist, and the people she encounters on her journey are just as interesting.

One weak point of Snowglobe is the build-up to the story's climax, where several new characters are suddenly introduced without being given enough time to grow on the reader. Soyoung Park does a very good job of portraying the closeness of the relationships between Chobahm and her allies, but it feels empty without the proper development.

The story also ends abruptly, and while the major mysteries are resolved, even more are introduced literally in the last ten pages of the book! Some kind of cliffhanger can be expected, with Snowglobe being the first in a duology, but the teases are just criminal.

Snowglobe ends by dropping several figurative bombs into what initially seemed to be a neatly resolved story. It’s difficult to imagine where the plot can go from here, but if the finely executed marriage of human-sized hamster wheels and mysterious lookalikes and Asian reality TV is any indication, Soyoung Park will stick the landing just fine.