The Island of Sea Women Annotated

 My annotation for historical fiction is up here!

I chose The Island of Sea Women by Lisa See, from 2019.

This was a fascinating book about a culture I didn't know existed, but became enthralled by!

Through various life circumstances, the women of the island came to be the workers and fishers while the men stayed ashore to care for the children. These haenyeo divers developed a long and lived culture, that through the course of the novel, faces changes, exploitation, and political threats over the course of Japanese occupation, the Korean civil war, and modern day.

Framing this narrative through the fictitious characters and their changing relationship brought in elements of relationship fiction, and gave an emotional depth and bitter nostalgia to the passage of time.

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