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michaelclorah 's review for:
The Color of Earth
by Kim Dong Hwa
The first book of a trilogy about a young girl's first love and her widowed mother learning to love again. I was very impressed by this one. The language is very poetic, creating many parallels between types of flowers and emotional states, with the obvious flowering imagery connecting to both the women's emotional state and the daughter's adolescence. The art is gorgeous. Lots left unresolved, but I want to see what comes next.
++++++++++++++++++
I wound up not enjoying the entire trilogy as much as I enjoyed the first installment. What starts as a poetic, poignant look at a mother and daughter growing up together becomes a little too concerned with two women longing for men to complete them. The flower and butterfly language eventually got tired, and the characters were sometimes difficult to distinguish (Ehwa seems to usually wear virginal white, and her mother darker colors - otherwise, I could not tell them apart). Still, many of the chapters still had something interesting to say about the lives of women in a bygone era, and witnessing Ehwa's coming of age was more often than not compelling.
++++++++++++++++++
I wound up not enjoying the entire trilogy as much as I enjoyed the first installment. What starts as a poetic, poignant look at a mother and daughter growing up together becomes a little too concerned with two women longing for men to complete them. The flower and butterfly language eventually got tired, and the characters were sometimes difficult to distinguish (Ehwa seems to usually wear virginal white, and her mother darker colors - otherwise, I could not tell them apart). Still, many of the chapters still had something interesting to say about the lives of women in a bygone era, and witnessing Ehwa's coming of age was more often than not compelling.