Book #17 of 2023: When My Name Was Keoko + 4 DNF

Continued theme: Books with things with wings on the cover.

When My Name Was Keoko by Linda Sue Park. Set in Korea during WW2, this story follows one family through a ten year period of Japanese occupation.

At first their lives weren't that bad, but quickly the Koreans were given the "honor" of having more and more of their possessions taken to fund the Japanese war effort. It wasn't long before they were given the "great honor" of taking a Japanese name and no longer being permitted to use their own names. Speaking Korean was against the law. The schools became at first a place to indoctrinate the kids, then later using them to make things for the war.

While there were many interesting things about this story, one of the things I really liked was seeing all the ways the different family members handled being occupied: Joining the resistance, just going along to get along and survive, being impotently angry, being deeply sad but trying to keep going for the rest of the family, and more.

As much as I liked this book, I don't intend to seek out more historical fiction right away. If this had been complete fiction, set on some alien world, I would have loved the hell out of it. But because it was based on reality, this really happened, real people suffered and starved and died, the book left me feeling depressed.

The Afterwards was even more depressing than the actual end of the story -- it filled in some of the blanks left in the story (since the POV characters hadn't known what happened). Things like tens of thousands of Korean girls being taken and forced to become "comfort girls" for the Japanese soldiers to rape. (I had known that's happened multiple times in human history, it's just really depressing to think about.)

It's a really good book, and even though it eventually had a... an almost happy ending (or at least a not bad ending), it left me feeling sad. Back to fiction for a long while!

DNF #36: Phoenix Flight (Skyborn #3) by Jessica Khoury. After forcing myself through the second book, the first time I felt like DNFing this book, I did it. Which was about four pages in. I found I just didn't care about the characters or story anymore.

DNF #37: Hover Car Racer by Matthew Reilly. I was just completely the wrong audience for this book. If you love cars and auto racing, if you like a completely overpowered young boy main character (a 15 year old boy who built his own hover car somehow beats professional adult racers), then this book is for you.

DNF #38: Wild Rescuers: Guardians of the Taiga by StacyPlays (sic). Much younger me would have LOVED this story. A girl was the sole survivor of a plane crash in Alaska, and a wolf pack adopts and raises her. She and the pack go on to rescue other animals in the Alaskan woods.

Unfortunately there was too much unbelievable stuff for adult reader me. The wolves somehow scaled and cleaned fish for her (I'd love to see how a wolf could scale a fish!). The girl was "very well educated" because the wolves stole books and newspapers from the local town for her to read. And somehow, even though she was 13-14 years old, she could ride on a wolf's back to travel miles.

The author did do something I loved: At the back of the book she had an almost ten page list of "Words I love that were used in this story". She defined each of them and used them in examples. A great thing for kids!

DNF #39: The Petticoat Pirate (Immortal Pirates Book 1) by C. R. Pugh. I don't know if this was a poorly written book or if I was just in a bad mindset for it (it's self-published, so I suspect the former). Set in the real world, some pirates are immortal, but only if they're at sea at sundown, otherwise they die and turn into sand. I just couldn't get into the story at all and DNFed it pretty quickly.