Once, when I picked up a book from the local library, the librarian asked to tell her what I thought about the book when I would bring it back. Well, why not write a few lines about all the books I read so everybody could see what I thought about it? I'm often also happy to have friends recommend a certain book or tell me this and that is not really worth reading. I won't comment about the tons of books I have read so far, but about books I read from now on.
| highly recommended | sehr empfohlen | |
| good reading | gutes lesematerial | |
| average | durchschnittlich | |
| not too interesting | nicht allzu interessant | |
| recommended not to read it | empfehlung das buch nicht zu lesen |
 |
|
|---|---|
| title | Daughters of the Dragon |
| author | William Andrews |
| ISBN-10 | 1-503-93626-0 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1-503-93626-3 |
| ASIN | |
| rating | |
| date | 2019-Mar-26 |
The text on the book cover is pretty misleading. Yes, for sure there is the story of Anna Carlson, but it is only used as a very thin wrapping for the main story of the book. The main story is the one of Hong Jae-Hee, from teenage girl to elderly lady. Jae-Hee did not have an easy life, mainly because at the age of fourteen she was forced by the Japanese occupants to become one of thousands of comfort women, which marked her for life.
Anna is US-raised. And she talks in short sentences. Very appropriate. Jae-Hee is older, Korean, marked and uses somewhat longer sentences. So the writing style of Andrews is good and it is easy to understand. However, some of the contents are quite tough, especially when Jae-Hee talks about her time as a comfort woman for the Japanese. There are lots of things you probably wouldn't want to know in so much detail, even though I think it could be much worse and Andrews actually has spared the reader a lot.
If you want to know about comfort women in Korea during the war and how they might have fared after the war, then this book probably does a good job. But you'll need to be able to stomach some ugly details. If you are looking for some entertainment or thought this might be an interesting mystery because of what you read on the book cover, then better put it back on the shelve.
