The Island of Sea Women

Fiction by Lisa See.

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/

I have already mentioned that I love Lisa See. So when I saw that she had a new book coming out, I jumped to get it. I expected a good story, probably about Asian (most likely Chinese) women, but I did not expect how different this one would be.

This book is set on the island of Jeju, which is off the coast of Korea, where the traditional society is very different from all the rest of Korea, or indeed most of Asia, and the world. The "sea women" mentioned in the title are traditional female divers who earned money for their families by harvesting sea creatures, while husbands watched their babies and cooked dinner at home. The story focuses mostly on a girl called Young-Sook from 1938-2008. It is fascinating!

One thing I was not prepared for is the atrocities committed after World War Two in this area, the memory of which was subsequently suppressed for over fifty years. It's terrible to think about the lives of innocent people lost. We like to believe that the Nazis were the only ones murdering huge groups of people, (oh, and Stalin, too) but these kinds of things crop up again and again in history. It's important to remember and not to repeat the evils of the past.

This was a wonderful character story, all in all, giving me a glimpse of a people very different from anything I've ever known, and yet still like me inside.

I highly recommend this book.

I also read recently by this author: The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane