The Island of Sea Women by Lisa See

One Maryland, One Book has been hosting state-wide readings, discussions, and author interviews for thirteen years now and they aren't going to let a pandemic stop them. The author Lisa See http://www.lisasee.com/ has been plumbing the depths of her Chinese-American background in fiction and memoir for many years now, developing a loyal fan base. She will be in zoom rooms all over Maryland next month to discuss her latest historical novel about the very remarkable, real women of Jeju Island, Korea, who have been supporting their families for generations by diving for abalone, octopus, sea urchins, and other edible creatures.


Spanning seventy years, See's story commences in 1938 during the run up to World War II and revolves

around the very complicated politics of the Korean peninsula and its subjugation by Japan. You may feel the need to head to Wikipedia to supplement your knowledge of this time and place. Still, there is a universal quality to the suffering of any people denied the right to self-rule and this suffering informs  the entire novel.


At the heart of the story is the enduring power of female friendships but also the inability to let go of wrongs. At one point our narrator Young-sook says of herself that she knows she has a heart of ice, that the anger and resentment she's harbored against her best friend Mi-Ja for decades is only hurting herself. But how do you forgive someone whose actions, or lack thereof, results in the death of your husband and son? Is that even possible?


Friends from early childhood, Mi-Ja and Young-sook were inseparable. They trained, as all the Jeju Island girls did, to be divers, the renowned Haenyeo who worked the sea while the men stayed home with the babies. The women were spiritualists, worshipping the goddesses of the mountains and oceans and relying on the advice of a shaman prior to boarding their boats. Often the girls traveled as far as Russia to dive during more propitious seasons. But one year, upon returning to Jeju, Mi-Ja and Young-sook meet a worldly charmer on the dock who offers help with their trunks. It will be decades before the horrific ramifications of Lee Sang-mun's appearance in their lives will be fully understood.


I'll admit that I had read more than sixty pages before the stories of these women and their families really grabbed me. The story began slowly but eventually I was immersed in the idea of this matrifocal society and the strengths and weaknesses of its culture. Ironically, though the women were the source of income, the men still held the power through property ownership. Women were illiterate, though education for boys was a coveted goal. Poverty was rampant and years of occupation and war brought refugees from the mountains to the seaside.


For seven years hunger and fear turned one against another as rebel forces formed and turned against the local constabulary. Protesters were tortured and murdered. Entire villages were burned and the people massacred but to speak of it brought a death sentence. Yet through all the upheaval these amazing women found solace in their friendships and in the sea. If stories of strength and resilience are your cup of tea then Lisa See's "The Island of Sea Women" should be your next read.

The Lions of Fifth Avenue

Can you imagine anything better than living in an apartment nestled under the staircases of the flagship New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue? Not if you're a librarian or book lover you can't! It seems that the author, Fiona Davis, has a penchant for writing novels that plum the historical depths of various iconoclastic New York City locations, including the famed Chelsea Hotel, The Dakota, home of John and Yoko, and even Grand Central Station. http://www.fionadavis.net/


This time she has combined a mystery about stolen or missing first editions with the story of the burgeoning women's movement beginning back in 1913 and

spanning three generations. Though highly improbable, "The Lions of Fifth Avenue," is great fun.


Jack Lyons is the superintendent of operations at the library, basically a Jack of all trades if you don't mind my pun. He spends his evenings holed up in his office struggling to write the great American novel. It falls to his wife Laura to handle the kids, Harry and Pearl, the shopping, cleaning, cooking, and all the mundane little things that make up the life of a homemaker. But she is  chomping at the bit for a challenge, to be financially independent and to use her Vassar degree. When she learns that the Columbia School of Journalism is admitting its first classes of women Laura dreams of the impossible and makes it happen.


In 1993 we meet Sadie Donovan, Laura Lyons' granddaughter, and an impassioned librarian who has just been promoted to curator of the Berg Collection at the very same library where her grandmother once lived and left under a cloud of suspicion and scandal. It seems that several rare books had disappeared under Jack's care. Now, just as Sadie is about to prove herself at her dream job, priceless manuscripts once again go missing. To make matters worse, she has kept her relationship to the Lyons family a secret from the library board and its director.


Davis creates a complex mystery angle that involves the original architecture of the library and a sparkling love interest between Sadie and the private investigator hired to uncover the thief. But it is Laura's story that is the more compelling as Davis  illustrates the severe restrictions that women in the early twentieth century faced while attempting to carve out a niche for themselves other than wife and mother.


A graduate of Columbia Journalism school herself, Davis is especially good at taking us inside the once all male institution and showing us the disdain the professors held for their female students, assigning them puff pieces on clothing or a day in the life of the mayor's wife. She incorporates the historical Heterodoxy Club, an early feminist organization formed to give women a place to use their voices to focus on individual freedom. As Laura becomes more involved with the club and its members we see her life expand in ways she couldn't have predicted. But of course, the joy of selfhood will be mitigated by unintended consequences that will be difficult for her to live with.


Chosen for the Good Morning America book club, "The Lions of Fifth Avenue," while not a work of sublime literature, is a rip-roaring good story that you'll sit down to on a rainy afternoon and finish long after dark as you wonder where the day went. Writers. How do they do it?

A Long Petal of the Sea

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I just had the pleasure of participating in a book discussion, through Zoom of course, with friends here in Maryland. I was so pleased to be asked to attend as the talk was of Isabel Allende's latest novel "A Long Petal of the Sea." I have been half in love with Allende ever since she sent me a personal letter over twenty years ago when offering her sincere regrets for not being able to attend our Southwest Florida Reading Festival. It was the classiest no I've ever received.

Allende fans know that many of her books address the immigrant experience and the pain of leaving one's homeland under duress. I'm sure that this theme reflects her own life experience as an exile from Chile when her uncle Salvador Allende, president at the time, had his government overthrown in a coup that was financed by the CIA. Isabel and her family escaped to Venezuela and she eventually settled here in the United States.

"A Long Petal of the Sea," a title taken from a Pablo Neruda poem which  describes the landscape of Chile, is a brilliant history lesson for those who didn't pay attention in school or, more likely, whose teachers spent little time on foreign affairs. In the late 1930's the Spanish civil war created a refugee crisis as all wars tend to do. Allende focuses on cardiologist Victor Dalmau and his brother Guillem's pregnant lover, the pianist Roser Bruguera, stranded in a camp in France,  who try to book passage on the Winnipeg, a ship that would be sailing to Chile where the poet and diplomat, Pablo Neruda, had arranged for over two thousand refugees to be taken in. The hitch was that only families could board. With Guillem missing and presumed dead in the war, Victor and Roser agree to a marriage in name only so that they can sail to safety.

For the next fifty years we follow the couple as they thrive in their new home, raise their son Marcel, face political turmoil and more displacement, and turn their deep friendship into a true marriage of equals. Other love stories grace the pages of this book but the crux of the novel is the never ending conflict between the ruling elite, represented by the del Solar family whose lives will significantly impact Victor and Roser, and the working people. Socialism, the good and the bad of it, is examined as is the unbreakable class structure, and the power of the Catholic church.

This prescient historical novel speaks eloquently to the current rise in authoritarian regimes around the world, the squelching of basic human rights, and the rising anti-immigrant sentiment so prevalent here in our own country. Though this particular book group assiduously avoided political talk one member did venture that we as a people so often fail to learn from history. I worry that this means we are, as they say, doomed to repeat it.