Daughters of the Dragon --by William Andrews

Fiction / Historical, Korea

362 pages / 2675 KB

4 Stars

This could have been an embarrassment, but had it turned out that way, I wouldn't be writing my review. You see, I ordered this book by accident, I wanted another and clicked the wrong button. I am sooooo glad I did.

Though I might not have read this book, had I read the story is about the comfort women, women enslaved by the Japanese for sexual pleasure. By the time I got there, I was intrigued by the story, and read on. Up front, let me state I thought the topic was handled as tastefully as possible.

Anna is Korean, was adopted by Americans as a baby, and is now twenty, and a college student. Her mother has died, and she and her father decide to go to Korea to meet her birth parents if possible. She finds out her birth mother died giving birth to her, but she does meet her grandmother who tells her an amazing story of her youth, an old comb, and how she and her sister were "volunteered" to be comfort women in China. 

This book is not just a story of survival. It is a story of family, of heritage, of coming of age. I am not an historian of Korea, or Asia, so I don't know how accurate the history is, and though there were places I thought might have been a tad contrived, and a couple of places I questioned the validity, over all I enjoyed the book and read it in a couple of days.

I do believe Japan still owes the comfort women a formal apology and some sort of compensense