I really wanted to love this book and kept waiting to fall under its spell but in the end I have to admit that this was a miss for me. I was drawn to a part of history I knew nothing about. I had no idea that large numbers of Korean women went to Hawaii as picture brides and I was so interested in reading in a book about a girl in that position. The author has clearly done her homework as there is a lot of historical detail in the book but it is never woven into a narrative that I especially cared about. I grew bored rather than invested. Things kept happening but the emotions around them felt distant to me and the things that should have felt important, like the graveyard confrontation, just fell flat. The twist ending seemed tacked on without the work put in to make it meaningful. Perhaps if pages had been spent on the making of the decisions to get to that moment it would have been impactful instead of feeling unnecessary. Beautiful cover, interesting premise, but for me it did not deliver.