Year of Impossible Goodbyes by Sook Nyul Choi

This book gave me a lot of mixed emotions. For about the first 3 chapters I hated it and did not know how I could possibly read the whole thing. After that though it became much more interesting and I really found myself getting into the book and rooting for Nuna and her family to get through the war and have freedom.

I don't know why the first few chapters bothered me so much. It may be because it was more of a before hand view and not so much about what was actually going on. I also thought that the book was going to be a lot different from the beginning so I was expecting more to be going on right from the beginning. Once they started to talk about the war and what the soldiers were actually doing to the Koreans and how the lived their lives in fear everyday of doing something wrong or getting sent away, the book became much easier to read and I actually could not put it down.

It amazed me how brave this little girl and her brother were. I could not imagine having to keep my home life a secret and not being able to tell anyone anything in fear of what may happen. I also thought that she was very brave when she went to school. The part about her sitting on the floor in the back of the room and having to go to the bathroom but being afraid to ask just devistated me. And then her having to see all of the little puddles underneath the little girls desks and then them being called on to go up to the board but them being really embarrased to, I just couldn't even imagine a thing like this happening.

There were so many parts to this book that just made me really think about how good I do have it. Having little kids go to "school" to make weapons to kill a group of people that they don't even dislike and brainwashing them into believing something totally different from what they had. I also thought about the sock girls and them being taken away. I knew the whole time what was going on but I really wish they would have talked about that more because I do think that it is a big deal. And the fact that now the Japanese are saying that it was all voluntary was crap.

I was so happy for Nuna and Inchun in the end. They had worked so hard and made it so far that they really did deserve to for once feel free. Them being so young but so brave really made you think that the things that we think are bad in life really aren't always as bad as we take them to be. You just have to look around at what other people are going through because you might just see that you have it pretty good.