There’s a gripping and very well-organized story with abundant historical detail, geographical descriptions and cultural/linguistic elaborations in Daughter of Moloka’i by Alan Brennert. However, despite all that, most characters are flat and do not engage the reader at an emotional level.
Although Daughter of Moloka’i is a sequel to Moloka’i, which I have not read, it is quite adequate as a stand-alone novel.
Ruth, a child born in a leper colony in Hawaii, to a Japanese father and a Hawaiian mother, is taken away at birth to an orphanage, where she lives before she’s adopted by a Japanese family. She lives in Honolulu for a few years until the family immigrates to the US, where the father works on his brother’s farm. She gets married, has two kids, the WWII happens, and the family is taken first to one internment camp, then to another. After the war she receives a letter from her birth mother, which sets off a whole new series of events in her life.
The book is divided into 21 chapters. The plot is neatly organized into segments and evenly distributed into the chapters. The reader is conditioned to expect a couple of important events in every chapter and is never disappointed. The story is interesting and moves logically and at a good clip from one event to the next. Descriptions of locations are vivid, (I’m dying to go to Hawaii after reading this book) and cultures are explained in full (and sometimes too much) detail.
Many themes are explored. Love, family, loyalty, tradition, mixed race, belonging, racism and war are all given due attention. Conflicts abide.
Brennert is careful not to paint all Americans as bigots. He’s got representatives of good people and bad people. There’s Joseph Dreesen, the sheriff, who hates the Watanabe family because they’re Japanese, and does everything in his power to hurt them. And there are Jim and Helen Russell, who are Watanabe’s friends and do whatever they can to help them.
The book feels as even as an accounting ledger. For every debit, there’s a credit.
But what’s lacking is real characters. The only characters that are two and half/three dimensional are Ruth and her birth mother, Rachel.
Ruth’s adoptive family is kind to a fault. Although the reasons why they adopted Ruth are logical, the reader doesn’t get any sense of nuance in their feelings towards her. They just love and accept her. The three brothers in the family are almost indistinguishable. There’s only a couple of episodes, in which Ruth talks to Ralph, her youngest brother, which give a slight indication of his personality.
Ruth’s husband, Frank, is equally kind and accepting of her. Again, with the exception of the chapter in which they meet, there’s little personal interaction between Ruth and Frank to give their relationship any depth. In fact, Ralph and Frank are such underdeveloped characters, that at some point in the middle of the book, this reader had to go back and check which one was the brother and which, the husband!
Peggy and Donnie, Ruth and Frank’s two children, are obedient and sweet in childhood, successful and respectful as adults, and love to spend time with their grandma. The reader doesn’t find out much more about them.
It’s surprising that the book shows the readers memorable settings, and immerses them in lifelike tense atmospheres, but when it comes to most characters it doesn’t tell the reader much more than what they said or did. As a consequence the reader doesn’t feel emotionally invested in them.
In short because of its half-baked characters Daughter of Moloka’i fails to realize its full potential despite its good story.