2009 book 187

Eugenia Kim's The Calligrapher's Daughter
This book is inevitably going to be compared to all of Lisa See's novels, since it has a similar scope, only set in Korea. Young girl coming of age on the eve of modernism, battling with her father's traditional ways, longs for education and a career, all during the Japanese-Korean conflicts of the 1920s and 30s (the novel goes through the end of WWII, but mostly concentrates on the earlier years). The end feels a bit rushed after a lot of build-up, and a few periods are told through letters, as though Kim didn't want to make the book any longer by including extraneous details, but it was still a pretty good read. B+.