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.)
I've been swamped with projects here lately! I'm doing a web maintenance project, and sometimes letting the writing go undone while I do that "day job". Tonight I added 651 words to The Alyssa Project and the new total is 57687 words now.
I've reorganized my Fight CPS And Win Newsletter and now have some wonderful staff members to help me put that together. I wrote a 1100-word article about allegations of abuse aimed at fosterers and a couple other shorter articles for this week's issue.
I finished the 4000-word worldbuilding project - for my "Escape from Walker City" novel. I've actually done the first draft on that but it needs an extensive revision that I'm about to start and so I decided to worldbuild on that scenario. This novel is the same as the one I used to call Pravado - I've changed the name of the city and it might change again if I think of something better. Fun with names.
My computer fan is making loud ominous noises. I wish a miracle would happen and it would just be normal again.
Wow.. I wrote that and the noise suddenly stopped. Weird. Well, I'd better post this now.
The very snowy day became a very snowy week - plus we had a power failure that knocked out two work nights for me.
Last night I wrote 1513 words on The Alyssa Project bringing the total to 47004. Tonight I worked on a different novel (remember Pravado?) ... I'm renaming the town to Walker City and rewriting it this month. I wrote over 1700 words of background material to go with it today.
