4.5 but only because it took me quite a while to get into the story.

Every time i read about comfort women my heart simultaneously breaks and fills with anger. One of my favourite memories comes from the day I visited the Comfort Women Museum in Seoul on a rainy day, the only person there. I do believe in ghosts and energies and things left behind, and to this day I never felt a deep pain and as burning anger tangible as I felt that day sitting alone in that museum, surrounded by the stories of these women.

I hope one day they will be able to rest in peace. Until then, please keep hunting us until the whole world knows what happened to you and apologises to you.

Wang Di lives through the Japanese occupation of Singapore. We are given a brief intro into her life before the war. When she is 17, she is forcibly taken by Japanese soldiers along with other young women from her village and turned into a "comfort woman." This section of the book is heartbreaking. The description of how many men rape her daily, and how they are starved, and beaten, and locked up and kept by other women. We then hear her story from her old age. Her husband has passed away and she is realizing that she is alone and had never truly gotten to know her husband's history and had never shared her war trauma with him. We see how that trauma affects her life throughout.

There is a second story line of a young 12-year-old boy, named Kevin. This is set in modern times (2000). Kevin grandmother has passed away and he discovers a secret and spends time unraveling that secret. In the end, this helps his own family heal.

Overall, the jumping back and forth between the stories is a little abrupt, but I enjoyed the stories. I liked the tie of the war time stories and Chinese elders to the modern time and young boy. It helps educate him as to what happened during that time period. It helps him to respect his elders more. He becomes closer to his parents.

I had also known about comfort women but had not actually read anything about their perspectives and stories. The details were a bit hard to read, actually horrific. I also felt extremely bad for the women, hearing how they were treated by their families and neighbors when they returned. As if they wanted to be comfort women or like they had a choice. I know this is non-fiction, but I hope that many of the women were able to find good places to live and were able to find communities that accepted them.

I found this quite disjointed and some of the characters weren't well developed. The story from the war was well written and very harrowing but the present day story lost me and I found it slow to get through.

The same thing happened to the other girls, their color and skin and flesh withering away into pale shadows, until they were little more than a collection of cuts and bones and bruises, badly healed. This, I thought, this is how we’re going to disappear.

I already know that this book is one that I’ll be revisiting in the future. I already know that there was things I missed and things I need more time to think through and process. I think this is the sort of book you could read over and over again and get a new perspective every time. I’m going to need some time before I can write a full review but I absolutely recommend this novel.