Writers of Color 50 Books Challenge

27. Kim Dong Hwa, The Color of Earth.
28. Kim Dong Hwa, The Color of Water.
29. Kim Dong Hwa, The Color of Heaven.

Three part series covering adolescence-to-marriage of Ehwa, a girl in rural Korea, her close relationship with her widowed mother, and the various romances of both mother and daughter.

The series changes character somewhat as it progresses. The first volume is a set of discrete stories -- approximately one story a year, as Ehwa is growing up -- and is my favorite volume of the lot. The latter two volumes are more continuous in time, chronicling the ups and downs of the pair's romantic relationships, and how those relationships affect the mother/daughter relationship (arguably the primary relationship of the series). There's quite a bit of romanticized pining about how "a woman's lot is to wait" in those two volumes (much more pronounced in the third volume than the second). In fact, it was a little odd how "woman's lot = waiting" the series got, given that Ehwa and her friends are fairly proactive about not-waiting in the first two volumes. :-/

Oh, I should also mention: there are sexytimes, both straight and lesbian. So there's always that. :-)

(...and not really related to the books themselves, but if you'll permit me to say: the cover copy on these is really annoying. Rural Korea is repeatedly described as "timeless" and "ageless," despite the fact that the text of these books specifically refer to the current time as being different from previous times. If what you mean to convey is, "Rural Korea remains recognizably rural Korea, even with the changes of time," then say that. The convention that some people get to have history, and others don't just i>bugs me. Bah.)

I notice that this review shades toward the negative, which is odd, given how much I enjoyed the earlier parts of the series. Perhaps if it was 2.5 volumes, so that we could get to the resolution without all the "oh, waiting, waiting" that was going on through the bulk of volume three? Because really, I liked the first two volumes. It's just that Water ends on a cliffhanger, and nothing much seems to happen in Heaven other than letting a decent interval pass before resolving said cliffhanger.