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Reviews tagging 'Death'

Trawa by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim

33 reviews

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Grass is a non-fiction graphic novel that uses information Keum Suk Gendry-Kim received during interviews with Osekon Lee herself. It discusses Lee's life as a child who ended up getting forced into sexual slavery as a comfort woman.

The writing was great and the art portrayed such sadness and trauma without being overly explicit. It was a quiet story that left you to sit in Lee's stories.

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dark informative reflective sad medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: A mix
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: No

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challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad tense slow-paced

Whenever I read or watch any piece of media discussing the experience of Korean comfort women, I’m always saddened by the level of detail and vividness with which these women remember their trauma.  And then I become embroiled with anger from the fact that there are people in this world who, to this day, deny that they even experienced it at all.

I’m going to say-- the fact that Shinzo Abe was never run through with a rusty pole during his time as Prime Minister of Japan is honestly astounding to me. 

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dark emotional informative medium-paced

This graphic novel is extremely important and powerful, while the art style is not the most elaborate, I think that the story does not need some beautifully detailed artwork to be told. Korean 'comfort women' aka women who were raped and abused by the Japanese army during the war, is a piece of history I was vaguely aware of but never really looked into it more. It is just as horrifying and tragic as one would imagine.

I would give this full five stars but the insertion of the author in the story didn't sit well with me, her stress about publishing Grass, getting the story out next to the actual experiences of the person she's writing about just did not seem right. Especially when she prodded the granny Lee Ok-Sun with the question about if there were some nicer soldiers that came because there might be less evil ones but they still came to rape those women just because they could. The last chapter about the author retracing the steps of Lee Ok-Sun was jarring because a few pages back there are traumas of the old woman bared naked and next there's the author complaining about airconditioning and air pollution. And on the same note, the afterword felt to me like the author got what she wanted from Lee Ok-Sun and didn't feel like vising her anymore.

Despite that, the book is something everyone should read at some point in their life.

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