Did not finish this book, I thought I would enjoy reading about a leper colony, but I didn't. I read for entertainment and enjoyment, this book provided neither for me.

The perfect sequel to one of my all time favorite books “Moloka’i”, Alan Brennert does not disappoint with this follow up. “Daughter of Moloka’i” is unique, emotional, and fascinating. Such a poignant read that makes this story come full circle.

Thank you to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

I struggled with this after reading Moloka’i… unfortunately this was a DNF for me after picking up three different times (hoping it would catch at some point). Thank you NetGalley…just couldn’t continue this second book.

I tried to read this one but was only able to make it a few chapters in. The first one was so good, but I just wasn't interested in this story.

Thank you Netgalley for the review copy.

"Daughter of Moloka'i" follows Ruth's journey from the Hawaiian orphanage through her adoption, a move to California, her marriage and subsequent internment during WWII. At the time of reading, I didn't realize this was a sequel to "Moloka'i" which describes the story of Ruth's parents and the circumstances of her forced abandonment. I strongly recommend reading "Moloka'i" first. While I enjoyed Ruth's story I would have found it a richer experience to know the background. What I found most stunning was the detailed description of the internment of the Japanese during the war. Having known only the most rudimentary facts of this period (and those white-washed and glossed over) I was deeply affected for a long time after finishing the book. Have some tissues at the ready for this one.

I received a review copy of this book from the publisher through NetGalley for my honest review. The opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own.

I love historical fiction and really enjoyed the original story of the daughter of Moloka'i. What I love most about historical fiction is learning about periods in our history which I hadn't previously known. The Moloka'i stories satisfy that combination of learning and fictional stories.

This book was amazing!

Parts of it felt a little long, especially near the end, but as I stayed with it the necessity of those slower places became evident. It was bringing the story of those two women's lives full circle. It was beautiful and heart wrenching. I creid more than a few times for the loss and the redemptions that were brought for both Ruth and Rachel.

I will reccomend this book!

I gave feedback on this book in a previous review. My gratefulness to NetGalley and the Publisher, and of course the author who wrote this beautiful novel, Daughter of Molokai, for this ARC.

Here is a brief recap: This was truly an eye opening and enjoyable novel, following the first in the series, which I really loved, "Molakai". Life on the island was juxtaposed with how horribly the islanders, original Hawaiians were treated during WWII by the Japanese. For those of you who haven't known or read any of the books involving the US and the US Japanese, please read this as well as so many others so you can have some understanding and empathy.

Poignant and timely story of adoption, coming of age, internment during WWII and finding her birth mother, this story of Ruth is a must read for historical fiction lovers.

In the first book, Molokai, Rachel and Kenji have to give up their baby because both are in a leprosy camp and do not want their daughter to contract the disease. This book is the story of Ruth, the baby they had to give up. See goodreads for full review.

I wasn't able to download and read this book due to a bad flare up of lyme disease. I apologize to Netgalley and the publisher and author.

This book is a sequal to the book Moloka’i. It focues on the life of Ruth. It covers her life from when her mother, Rachel, is forced to surrender her because of being an inmate at a leper colony … to her time in the Japanese internment camp during WWII … to her life when the war ends. The author does an amazing job with the vivid descriptions of Hawaii. While you can read his book as a standalone, it would be beneficial to read Moloka’i first.

Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for my advanced review copy. All opinions and thoughts are my own.

“Then I returned and considered all the oppression
that is done under the sun:

And look! The tears of the oppressed,
But they have no comforter
On the side of their oppressors there is power,
But they have no comforter.
Therefore I praised the dead who were
already dead,
More than the living who are still alive.
Yet, better than both is he who had never
existed,
Who has not seen the evil work that is done
under the sun.”
—Ecclesiastes 4:1-3

A STAR IS BORN.

The Isle of Oahu, 1917 — Sister Mary Louisa Hughes, a native of Chicago’s South Side, has answered her divine calling for volunteer service on the stunning island of Oahu, where she serves at the Kapi’olani Home for Girls. Kapi’olani Home is an orphanage for young girls who have been abandoned by leprous parents unable to care for them any longer. And Sister Mary Louisa Hughes is one of only several nuns—the Sisters of St. Francis, respectively—in whose tender loving care the orphaned girls are. As this powerfully touching tale begins to bare its troubled soul to the reader, the mighty Pacific is baring its proverbial fangs at the inhabitants of dry land, scooping up from its resources an irritable storm of Herculean winds and torrential rain. The elements are wicked on this fateful evening, but all is peaceful and quiet behind the blessed walls of Kapi’olani Home. Sister Mary Louisa Hughes is wide awake at this late hour, watching the storm and reflecting over the great path her life has taken when an urgent knocking on the doors of the Home startles her back to the present. The visitor is a fellow nun, one Sister Catherine Voorhies, standing in the pouring rain and holding in her safeguarding arms what appears to be a bundled baby. The baby, only a year old, is named Ruth Utagawa. And she has been brought to Kapi’olani Home from Moloka’i because her parents are lepers. Lepers who personally requested that their daughter be transported, via Sister Voorhies, to the nurturing Home for care. The vigilant nun and baby girl are quickly welcomed inside and provided with warm, dry clothing, among other things. And it is here that we witness the testimony of Sister Catherine Voorhies, where it concerns the beautiful baby girl named Ruth—who also happens to be the star of this lovely tale.

FOUR YEARS LATER.

The Isle of Oahu, 1921 — After promising Sister Catherine Voorhies that she would look after baby Ruth and keep her well, Sister Mary Louisa Hughes has done just that. She has done everything in her human ability to love the child as though she were her own. Now five years old, Ruth Utagawa—despite her feelings of occasional loneliness and random outbursts of anger towards her birth parents for giving her away to an orphanage—is growing up in wisdom and knowledge; and carrying her weight in understanding. An animal lover who has grown accustomed to various forms of disappointment, including her failing hopes of ever being adopted by a loving - and stable - family, the half-Japanese/half-Hawaiian Ruth is currently coming down from the high of her latest tantrum. Ruth is contending with another kindergartner when Sisters Mary Louisa and Praxedes inform her that a couple is waiting to meet her. A Japanese family is looking to adopt a little girl, particularly one of Japanese heritage. And Ruth Utagawa is just that, if only relatively.
Mister Taizo Watanabe and his lovely wife Etsuko, Japanese immigrants in their late thirties, become smitten with Ruth, especially after engaging in a brief conversation with the child. They agree that she is just the daughter they both desired but were unable to have. And without further ado, the well-mannered couple files the necessary paperwork to set the adoption process in motion. Finally, Ruth has a family to call her own. And from henceforth, she will be addressed by her Japanese-translated name, Dai. Dai Watanabe.

The Watanabes live in the heart of Hawaii’s multi-ethnic Chinatown. And here is where Ruth/Dai comes to know her new home and family, including three older brothers: seven-year-old Ryuu, twelve-year-old Satoshi, and fourteen-year-old Haruo. The family also has a gorgeous pet black cat named Mayonaka – to whom Ruth/Dai becomes instantly attached. With their living quarters set above Taizo’s contracting business, the family make their way along well and dwell in peace. Of course, there is much for five-year-old Ruth/Dai to learn: Japanese customs, the Japanese language, and so forth. And with time, she masters them admirably, both at school and home. Yes, the Watanabes are getting along great - until Jiro’s telegram arrives.

BROTHERS IN (F)ARMS.

Since their childhood years, in their native Japan, Jiro, Taizo’s older, nettlesome, and one-upper of a brother, has forever been in cahoots with a malicious scheme to prey on the self-esteem of his younger brother; nevertheless, Taizo continued to worship him. And in current times, things have barely changed as Taizo is still emotionally dependent, needy, and a man-pleaser towards his three-years-older sibling, even to the extreme of false idolatry.

Generational (and brilliant) farmhands, the migrant Watanabe brothers, including eldest son Ichirō, the second son Jiro, and the youngest son Taizo, would carry on the family tradition while settled in Hōfuna (Hawaii), the place of Ichirō’s vast inheritance: the family farm. Jiro would be the first to vacate Japan for the Pacific Islands, followed closely by Taizo. And after working for the eldest son, the middle child would gather up his possessions (including monies saved) and relocate his wife and children to sunny California. There he would establish his farm and harvest great wealth from it. Or at least that’s what he leads his number one fan in Taizo to believe. While Taizo and his (faithful) wife Etsuko, along with their four children, including the newly-adopted Ruth/Dai, are content to remain in Hawaii, Jiro comes along to make Taizo an offer he will not be able to refuse. Jiro offers the proud, albeit needy, Taizo part ownership in his highly lucrative California farm business. Of course, Taizo cannot make such a drastic move without first consulting with his wife. And while Etsuko has never much cared for the boastful Jiro, initially disapproving of his offer, she soon relents after seeing how excited Taizo is about his brother’s telegram. Determined to please (and appease) her husband, Etsuko agrees to uproot their children and their relatively comfortable Hawaiian lives for the sake of migrating to the sunny California town of Florin. But once there, on the fertile grounds of the West Coast, the close-knit Watanabe clan will soon come to a sad realization: California, c. 1922-1923, is anything but sunny, and the so-called American dream is anything but a dream. Indeed, it would have been better for the Watanabes had they stayed put in their humble abode of Hawaii’s booming Chinatown than for Taizo to have so eagerly honored the request of his brother Jiro’s long-distance telegram. For the pain of regret is a brutal and unrelenting agony.

THE ACCRETION.

In this heartwarming saga of historical fiction, readers should brace themselves for a long voyage through the thick, foggy haze of an unforgivable time in American history. It was a time when racial indifferences, blended with war and a wicked desire to maintain the status quo, wreaked ferocious havoc on the human body, the human mind, and the weary human soul.

Over thirty years, an embittered anguish will seek to gorge itself on those who are without a country, who are without a human defender, and who are without the tender mercies of the living God. On these pages, the reader has transported back in time to the eras of the Oriental Exclusion Act of 1924 (President Chester A. Arthur) and the U.S. Stock Market Crash of 1929. The reader will relive the Great Depression in the era of President Herbert Hoover as well as the act of immorality that rendered it all just a little bit worse: Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, c. 1941.
That heinous act would set off a savage chain of events: everything from an all-out assault on the Japanese-American community to the spoiling of their homes, their crops, and their successful businesses to condemning them all to many ruthless years in American Internment Camps to Nazi Germany with its Extermination Camps of mass murder to the assassination of the notorious Benito Mussolini by Italian partisans to the cowardly suicide of the demoniac who had been named Adolf Hitler to the attack on the Philippines capital of Manila through the Japanese invasion of Thailand to the Soviet Union’s assault on Berlin to America’s vicious retaliation against Japan by way of Hiroshima to the imminent death of President Roosevelt – who had been our nation’s 26th, respectively. One of the darkest periods in World history, indeed. And throughout it all, we follow the now-adult (and married) Ruth/Dai and her inseparable family from Hawaii to Florin to the Tanforan Barracks of San Francisco to Shangri-La. We follow the family to the Sierra Nevada in the Mojave Desert to San Jose and back: for their tribulations number many. And the inhumane oppression on these pages does not intend to conform, that it should cuddle and cosset the faint-hearted.

THE PLAYERS.

Before a powerful performance, there is always a powerful script. Very rarely do the two not coincide. And in the case of this fabulously penned composition of historical literature, Alan Brennert has shown himself irrefutably approved in both structure and vision: for his script is a magnificent dialogue portrayed by his cast perfectly. Our lead and supporting ensemble appears as follows:

• Ruth Watanabe-Harada is our leading lady and a force of nature.

• Taizo Watanabe, Ruth’s adoptive father and a man the reader will forever embrace, even long after the final page turns.

• Etsuko Watanabe is the adoptive mother of Ruth. The gentle human equivalent to a lovely Buddhist Lotus, the precious and patient Etsuko boasts an unforgettable performance on these moving pages.

• Haruo Watanabe, translated “Horace,” Ruth’s adoptive older brother, the first-born child of Taizo and Etsuko, and the spit of his earthly father. For much like Taizo, a highly-skilled cultivator dwells within the soul of Horace.

• Satoshi Watanabe, translated “Stanley,” Ruth’s adoptive older brother, the second-born child of Taizo and Etsuko, and a warm proverbial kiss on the awaiting cheek.

• Ryuu Ralph Watanabe is Ruth’s adoptive older brother and the third-born child of Taizo and Etsuko. Witty and always positive-minded, Ralph has an easy-going mindset. His motto is this: laugh in the face of adversity, that you do not buckle at the knee under the distortion of its abnormally hateful expression.

• Jiro Watanabe is Taizo’s older brother, Ruth’s uncle, and an ambitious, prosperous farmer, albeit a selfish one.

• Nishi Watanabe is Jiro’s faithful-to-a-fault wife.

• Akira Watanabe is Jiro’s beloved son and an Enemy of the State.

• Rose Ishida is the beautiful and loyal wife of Horace.

• Frank Harada is a hard-working restaurateur who becomes a loving husband to Ruth. For their unbreakable union, a single slice of delicious strawberry pie is to be partially credited.

• Donnie Harada is a sports enthusiast and the first-born child of Frank and Ruth Harada.

• Peggy Harada is a living doll and the second-born child of Frank and Ruth Harada.

• Sheriff Joseph Dreesen is a local farmer and the Sheriff of Florin. This man represents the (ugly) face of racism. And it will forever haunt the nightmares of the Watanabe family.

• Rachel Utagawa is a former leper and Ruth Harada’s long-lost birth mother. For with her entrance, no reader’s eye shall be able to resist shedding many a tear.

Complemented by a fascinating ensemble of bit players, this cast shines brightly amid the rulers of darkness.

Joining the top-billed stars on these pages are none other than the Sisters of St. Francis convent of Honolulu, Chieko Cricket Yamoto, Phyllis Thomas, Freddy Kurahara, Jim Russell, Helen Russell, Jerry Kara, Vivian Kara, Nakajiro Kikuchi, Shizuko Kikuchi, and Charles Kikuchi. The repulsive Henry McLemore and former Chief of Justice of the United States, Earl Warren, also make special guest appearances.

THE ANALYTICAL FINALE.

There is always a price to pay for acts of evil, regardless of their form. And the longer divine retribution may take to become evident on such offenders, the worse that divine wrath will be: for divine vengeance is not in the least slack, only patient. Therefore stand. And after having done all, stand.
When they toss you lemons, you relieve the fruit of their juices, add water and sugar to taste, and voilà! You got lemonade. When they throw you the entrails of a hog, you pick them up, clean them by hand, wash and rinse them well, boil them in a perfectly seasoned broth, make a side of spaghetti and potato salad, and voilà! You got yourself a chitterling—or chitlin—meal. And when they usher you into the most uninhabitable living spaces, you sweep, you scrub with cleanser, you mop with bleach, you paint, you decorate, you burn a stick or two of incense for a pleasant scent, and voilà! You got yourself a home. That is how you survive when you find yourself counted among the oppressed in any given nation of oppressors. It is how the human spirit is strengthened and not broken. And on the pages of Daughter of Moloka’i, the Watanabe family unit wills itself to survive - despite innumerable odds.

Emotionally challenging and mesmerizingly beautiful, Daughter of Moloka’i is a work of historical fiction that will wow you, anger you, excite you, command you to shed a myriad of tears, and double dare you to writhe out of its powerful grip. It is perhaps one of the best narratives of its respective class that my avid reader has ever enjoyed the pleasure of viewing. And of it, Alan Brennert should be tremendously proud as there is no greater level than that. With its stunning cover art and storyline, Daughter of Moloka’i is every bit worthy of its notoriety. Indeed, it is a must-read for every member of the historical fiction community. The tale does employ a massive cast. But due to its storyline detailing over forty years of history, such a considerable ensemble is expected. Congratulations on a fine effort, Mr. Brennert.

I ka ohana i e pules pu nohos pu. Those words translated in English, dear reader? The family that prays together stays together.

Five Alohawaiian stars.


REVIEWER'S NOTE: It is my kind pleasure to thank St. Martin's Press, as well as NetGalley, for the complimentary copy of Daughter of Moloka'i (Moloka'i #2) in exchange for my honest review.

Analysis of Daughter of Moloka'i (Moloka'i #2) by Alan Brennert is courtesy of the Reviews by Cat Ellington book series.

Date of Review: Wednesday, December 11, 2018

Took me longer than usual to get into this book. Not sure why. I enjoyed it. Im going to blame my sleep deprived new baby brain. I give it 4 stars.

I don't know why I waited so long to read the sequel to Moloka'i, because I loved the first one so much. This one doesn't disappoint. It follows the story of Rachel's daughter Ruth and a very dark period of our nation's history. I knew about the concentration camps that the Japanese Americans were put in during WWII but have never read a book about it. This book gave me more insight into how horrific and wrong it was. This is a beautiful story that I will not soon forget.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review. In the first book, Rachel develops leprosy and is taken to an island leper colony. This book follows the life of her daughter, Ruth, who was given up for adoption. This book is amazing. Rachel was a wonderful character and her daughter was just as great. The characters are all well developed and the story is emotional and heart-warming. I wholeheartedly recommend it for all lovers of historical fiction and Hawaii.

I thoroughly enjoyed Moloka’i and equally enjoyed Daughter of Moloka’i. It was so interesting to follow Ruth, daughter of Rachel, through her life. What an interesting and heartbreaking story. The author does an excellent job of making you feel like you’re there with his descriptions of the world around the families in this book.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for allowing me to read and review this beautiful book.

I so enjoyed reading this book. I read Moloka'i when it first came out and was so taken with the story and the characters. Now years later I was exciting to see what became of all the people that I met in the book. It was a beautiful read, a love story and heartbreaking at the same time.
I truly enjoyed reading it and I would probably read the two books again.
Thank you Mr. Brennert for your wonderful books.

This is book #2 in the Moloka'i series, but this could be read as a standalone. Moloka'i centered on the history of leprosy in Hawaii, and this book follows the daughter who did not have leprosy. It begins in Hawaii and follows the main character, Ruth, to California through the 1960's. It combines Hawaiian and Japanese-American culture with history and makes for a book rich in emotions and heritage.