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A review by annaemilia
Daughters of the Dragon: A Comfort Woman's Story by William Andrews
2.0
The only thing worth mentioning about this book (and why I don't give it a 1-star rating) is it's extremely important subject matter, the fact that women from all over Asia were forced to be "comfort" women for Japanese soldiers during WWII. If you've never heard about this part of history or are interested to learn more I'd encourage you to watch documentaries and interviews of comfort women on youtube and read on historical facts, but skip this book completely.
The writing is extremely rudimentary, the dialogue is unnatural and the storytelling is like straight from a bad wattpad-novel. I'm sorry, but from the first few pages I was cringing hard and the only reason I kept going was hoping the story would prove the read worthwhile. It did not. Rarely have I read stories as badly written and told as this one, which is a shame. Looking at the average rating, this story has still resonated with people which I don't see as a bad thing at all, because more people should know about this particular time in history. It's still jarring to see such a high rating on a historical fiction novel that has one of the worst writing I've ever read.
Apart from the sloppy and lazy writing I was also taken aback by subtle cultural inaccuracies throughout the novel. Misspelled Korean words (romanized) and used in weird context or altogether wrong, and completely missing the actual cultural atmosphere in 1940-1970s (it's evident heavy googling was involved). The novel is not historically inaccurate per-se, but clearly shows little understanding to the historical and cultural aspects of Korea.
The writing is extremely rudimentary, the dialogue is unnatural and the storytelling is like straight from a bad wattpad-novel. I'm sorry, but from the first few pages I was cringing hard and the only reason I kept going was hoping the story would prove the read worthwhile. It did not. Rarely have I read stories as badly written and told as this one, which is a shame. Looking at the average rating, this story has still resonated with people which I don't see as a bad thing at all, because more people should know about this particular time in history. It's still jarring to see such a high rating on a historical fiction novel that has one of the worst writing I've ever read.
Apart from the sloppy and lazy writing I was also taken aback by subtle cultural inaccuracies throughout the novel. Misspelled Korean words (romanized) and used in weird context or altogether wrong, and completely missing the actual cultural atmosphere in 1940-1970s (it's evident heavy googling was involved). The novel is not historically inaccurate per-se, but clearly shows little understanding to the historical and cultural aspects of Korea.