The voice of Jennifer Lim brings a subtle, down-to-earth realism to See's (The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane) new novel which explores the matrifocal society of the haenyeo, female divers of Jeju, an island off the coast of present-day South Korea. Listeners experience events through the eyes of diver Young-sook as she learns her craft during the Japanese occupation of Korea, through World War II, and into the present era. Her friend Mi-ja, an orphan and child of a Japanese collaborator, is taken in by Young-Sook's mother and taught to dive, but the friendship is sorely tested shortly after World War II during a time of mass murder. Known as the 4.3 Incident, this was an actual event covered up by the South Korean government for decades. VERDICT Recommended for loyal See fans, for those with an interest in Korea, and historical fiction fans in general. ["Superbly written, this fast-paced read not only encourages readers to reflect on the notion of friendship and family, it also educates on the complex history of the region": Xpress Reviews 2/15/19 review of the Scribner hc.]--David Faucheux, Lafayette, LA

*Starred Review* They meet at age seven. Young-sook and her mother are working their garden; Mi-ja crouches among the sweet-potato plants, desperate to eat. They are on Korea's Jeju Island, known for its Three Abundances of wind, stones, and women, it was also acknowledged for lacking three other things: beggars, thieves, and locked gates. Mi-ja is a city transplant living with relatives, who consider her a servant. She is also the village pariah because her late father was a collaborator with the brutal Japanese colonizers. Ironically, this becomes Mi-ja's best day since being orphaned because she leaves Young-sook's with a full belly, a surrogate mother, and a best friend. Trained together as haenyeo Jeju's renowned sea women who free dive for sea life Young-sook and Mi-ja share intimate joys and survive debilitating hardships into adulthood, wifehood, and motherhood, until an unfathomable tragedy sunders their closer-than-sisters bond. Sixty years later, Young-sook is a national treasure, a world-traveled octogenarian haenyeo. On her shoreline appear Mi-ja's granddaughter and her American family; Young-sook's initial denials acquiesce to reveal a past driven by love, loss, betrayal, perhaps even forgiveness. A stupendous multigenerational family saga, See's (The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, 2017) latest also provides an enthralling cultural anthropology highlighting the soon-to-be-lost, matriarchal haenyeo phenomenon and an engrossing history of violently tumultuous twentieth-century Korea. A mesmerizing achievement. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: See's accomplishment, acclaim, and readership continue to rise with each book, and interest in this stellar novel will be well stoked.--Terry Hong Copyright 2019 Booklist

On an island off the South Korean coast, an ancient guild of women divers reckons with the depredations of modernity from 1938 to 2008 in See's (The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, 2017, etc.) latest novel.The women divers of Jeju Island, known as haenyeo, don't display the usual female subservience. Empowered by the income they derive from their diving, harvesting seafood to consume and sell, haenyeo are heads of households; their husbands mind the children and do menial chores. Young-sook, See's first-person narrator and protagonist, tells of her family and her ill-fated friendship with Mi-ja, who, rescued from neglectful relatives by Sun-sil, Young-sook's mother, is initiated into the diving collective headed by Sun-sil. The girls grow up together, dive together, and go on lucrative assignments in the freezing waters near Vladivostok, Russia. They are also married off together, Mi-ja to Sang-mun, who, as World War II progresses, is enriched by collaborating with the Japanese, and Young-sook to Jun-bu, a neighbor and childhood playmate. The novel's first half is anecdotal and a little tedious as the minutiae of the haenyeo craft are explored: free diving, pre-wetsuit diving garb, and sumbisori, the art of held breath. As two tragedies prove, the most prized catches are the riskiest: octopus and abalone. See did extensive research with primary sources to detail not only the haenyeo traditions, but the mass murders on Jeju beginning in 1948, which were covered up for decades by the South Korean government. As Jeju villages are decimated, Young-sook loses half her family and also, due to a terrible betrayal, her friendship with Mi-ja. The tangled web of politics and tyranny, not to mention the inaction of U.N. and American occupiers leading up to the massacres, deserves its own work, perhaps nonfiction. In the context of such horrors, the novel's main source of suspense, whether Young-sook can forgive Mi-ja, seems beside the point.Although this novel's reach exceeds its grasp, it is a necessary book. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

See (The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane) once again explores how culture survives and morphs in this story of a real-life Korean female diving collective. Young-Sook and Mi-Ja meet as young girls in 1939 in Hado, a village on the island of Jeju, where traditionally the women earn a living while their husbands care for the children and home. The two girls begin training as haenyeo, divers who harvest oysters, sea slugs, and octopi from the sea. But after WWII when American occupation of southern Korea begins, the two grow apart. While Young-Sook struggles to make ends meet for her family, Mi-Ja's husband's role in the government spares her the economic suffering endured by most of the country. But after Mi-Ja's family betrays Young-Sook, Young-Sook struggles for decades to reconcile her anger with fond memories of her friend, even after their families cross paths again. Jumping between the WWII era and 2008, See perceptively depicts challenges faced by Koreans over the course of the 20th century, particularly homing in on the ways the haenyeo have struggled to maintain their way of life. Exposing the depths of human cruelty and resilience, See's lush tale is a wonderful ode to a truly singular group of women. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

"JEJU is her home, an island known for Three Abundances: wind, stones and women." Thus begins Lisa See's newest novel, "The Island of Sea Women," which is set on a Korean island and draws on the centuries-long history of the haenyeo, female divers who have effectively created a matrifocal society - they are the breadwinners of their families, while their husbands take on the domestic duties of cooking the meals and raising the children. After her nonfictional debut, "On Gold Mountain," and a series of three mysteries, all of See's subsequent novels have been historical, yet history never seems to be her main focus. Instead, underlying all of See's work is the theme of female friendship. Throughout her oeuvre, which spans periods from the 19th century to the mid-20th and backdrops from Shanghai to San Francisco, See excels at exploring the bonds between women, whether friends or family. Much like her last novel, "The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane," which explored the lives of the Akha hill tribe and the tea trade in the remote Yunnan province through the lenses of a mother and daughter, "The Island of Sea Women" tells its own story through the friendship of Young-sook, the daughter of the head haenyeo diver, and Mi-ja, the orphaned daughter of a Japanese collaborator. See's vivid prose and thorough research together bring to life the seafaring existence of these women: "The boat dipped and swayed in the light chop. I attached my bitchang to my wrist and grabbed my net and tewak. A light wind blew, and I began to shiver. I was feeling pretty miserable." The narrative alternates in time between 2008 - when an aging Young-sook sits on a beach sorting algae, fielding the incessant questions of onlookers ("Are they scholars, journalists or documentarians?" she wonders), her life having been transformed into a kind of living diorama - and her early childhood years, starting in 1938 during the Japanese occupation of Korea, which began nearly 30 years earlier. In her depictions of the harsh colonization, the power of See's words shines through: "We hated the Japanese, and they hated us. ... They'd killed Grandmother's parents, and she called them chokpari - cloven-footed ones. Mother always said that if I was ever alone and saw colonists, whether soldiers or civilians, I should run and hide, because they'd ruined many girls on Jeju." The girls' friendship begins to fray when their marriages are arranged, beautiful Mi-ja's to the wealthy son of a Japanese collaborator who lives in the more urban Jeju City rather than the hardscrabble countryside, Young-sook's a humbler marriage to a neighbor boy, Jun-bu. As in many of See's plots, we have little hope that the men will bring happiness. Mi-ja quotes a proverb that all but guarantees bad times ahead: "When a woman gets married, she has the best food for three days. That must last her a lifetime." Abuse of male power is indeed as much a through line in See's fiction as are female bonds - by bosses, fathers, brothers, husbands, lovers. See's heroines are uniformly resilient in facing these misdeeds, although she does allow rare periods of marital bliss between Young-sook and Jun-bu: "Sometimes we went to the water's edge. Sometimes we strolled through the olles. Other times we'd climb an oreum, stare out at the view, talk, and sometimes do nighttime activities in the broad daylight." See's meticulous research is perhaps most apparent in the magical, strange passages when Young-sook and Mi-ja, both married and pregnant, go for "leavinghome water-work," a.k.a. contract diving jobs, in Vladivostok: "The moment of submersion into that cold seemed to calm my baby, put him to sleep, freeze him in place. As the months passed and our bellies grew, water offered new comforts. As soon as I was submerged, my aches were massaged, and the weight of my baby was buoyed. I felt strong." Mi-ja gives birth on the job, climbing out of the water only to deliver her son on the deck, and once Young-sook's daughter is born they take care of the infants together during breaks on the boats, the cradles tied to the rocking deck. Less successful are See's treatments of larger historical moments, during which the characters are often reduced to mouthpieces for exposition. On the heroines' return from Vladivostok to Jeju City, dockworkers clunkily inform them of the impending Allied invasion: "Ten Japanese army divisions are here - many of them hiding! In caves! In lava tubes! And in special bases they've built into the cliffs right at the shoreline!" The second half of the novel chronicles the largely unknown, horrific violence of the 4.3 Incident (named for the date it began, April 3,1948, three years after Japan surrendered occupation of Korea), in which a communist insurgency was suppressed by the United States-installed government and the police in a campaign that killed tens of thousands of people. See dramatizes atrocities committed by the military during the Bukchon massacre in a harrowing scene in which Young-sook loses both the majority of her family and her friendship to Mi-ja. This is not the only passage in which the narrowness of the novel's focus (solely on this one friendship) underserves the importance of the events that are its backdrop. At the outbreak of the Korean War, in 1950, the United States had command of the South Korean military but stood aside, documenting the bloodshed but not defending civilians. South Korea's call for "pre-emptive apprehension" of suspected communist insurgents, as well as its subsequent 50-year denial of the war crimes, has chilling parallels to more recent and current wars. The National Committee for the Investigation of the Truth about the Jeju Incident has laid blame on both the American and Korean militaries. Historical fiction can be as political and as pertinent to today's world as it is illustrative of the world it depicts. As of 2019, neither government has yet made good on their promises of reparations to the victims of Jeju. See's thoughtful and empathetic book sheds necessary attention on this largely ignored event. Tatjana soli is the author of "The Lotus Eaters" and, most recently, "The Removes."