Book Discussion: "The Island of Sea Women" by Lisa See

They meet at age seven. Young-sook and her mother are working their garden; Mi-ja crouches among the sweet-potato plants, desperate to eat. They are on Korea's Jeju Island, "known for its Three Abundances of wind, stones, and women, it was also acknowledged for lacking three other things: beggars, thieves, and locked gates." Mi-ja is a city transplant living with relatives, who consider her a servant. She is also the village pariah because her late father was a collaborator with the brutal Japanese colonizers. Ironically, this becomes Mi-ja's "best day" since being orphaned because she leaves Young-sook's with a full belly, a surrogate mother, and a best friend. Trained together as haenyeo—Jeju's renowned sea women who free dive for sea life—Young-sook and Mi-ja share intimate joys and survive debilitating hardships into adulthood, wifehood, and motherhood, until an unfathomable tragedy sunders their closer-than-sisters bond. Sixty years later, Young-sook is a national treasure, a world-traveled octogenarian haenyeo. On her shoreline appear Mi-ja's granddaughter and her American family; Young-sook's initial denials acquiesce to reveal a past driven by love, loss, betrayal, perhaps even forgiveness. A stupendous multigenerational family saga. --Booklist

Find the ebook here in Libby, by Overdrive

Find the eaudiobook here in Libby, by Overdrive