Great book
When My Name Was Keoko
I recently finished reading When My Name Was Keoko by Linda Sue Park, published in 2002. This is the first of her four books I’ve read. As I understand it - so far all her books are historical novels set in Korea because... she’s Korean by heritage though she was born and raised in the USA.
This book shares the history and drama of the Japanese occupation of Korea. For those of us living in a comparatively free civilization, its hard to understand how terribly oppressed the Koreans were at that time, but this book helps by first getting us emotionally involved in the lives of two children, then by showing all the absurd problems they lived through such as the forced switch to using Japanese names rather than Korean names.
This book has an unusual dual-first-person point of view. At first it drove me crazy as the chapters switched back and forth between the sister and the brother. Eventually I got used to it and was able to enjoy the rest of the book. Since Linda Sue Park just won the Newbery Medal for A Single Shard I guessed she could have written a book about kissing frogs standing on their heads and it still would have been accepted by dozens of publishers. But the book is really very good and I’ll be recommending it to anyone - especially homeschool families studying World War II.
Next I'll be reading her first novel, Seesaw Girl, because I'm curious to see why it was accepted the first time she sent it out. Clarion Books is the publisher. (She mentioned her good fortune on her website: Linda Sue Park.)
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