She reminds me a lot of Scarlett O' Hara in that regard. She just doesn' t have time fret or wallow or do anything other than figure out what to do about it. Her attitude toward life and the way she deals with disappointment and tragedy are so practical I want to call them inspiring, though I don' t think they were meant to be. Still, things must change, and it' s all about how you deal with it and that brings me back around to how great a character Chye Hoon is. I feel like I would be Chye Hoon' s eldest daughter in this scenario, having done things the old way already and watching a sibling press for the new way. I exist in that strange middle ground where I remember making mixed tapes and having dial-up but have also had a cell phone for almost all my adult life. It reminds me of the way cell phones and then smart phones and then social media changed the way people interact in this century. I also loved the pace with which the West and Western ideas mixed into their culture. I loved watching the changes, for good or bad, of the people as they embraced, or didn' t, the white people in their town and what the Western influence was doing to it. It' s also a great look at the colonization of the East from the point of view of an Eastern person. She has her own ways of dealing with the problems that were always there. This is not a story that presents a utopia that was ruined by the white people, though you may see ruining. Still, not all of her problems are caused by the white people. We also get to experience her initial racism toward the whites and her concerns about what they were doing with her culture. We get to experience her hesitation with introducing the West and it' s education with her children. We get to experience her disappointments, the things out of her reach because she was a girl and then her decision making process with whether or not to make the same choices for her own daughters. She' s actually the definition of why it' s great to read diverse books, especially by own voices. She isn' t another modern woman thrown into a historical world but she also isn' t the picture of her historical world that we often get in the US. It focuses on Chye Hoon, who is a great protagonist. Like I said before, this story is incredibly relatable. She' s chronicling her "journey as a writer" on it but before this month it had been about getting to that point where she would publish her first novel. Check out her profile and blog, you won' t regret it. Before sitting down to the write review, I checked out the author and the blurb on her was interesting and so was her blog (linked on her Goodreads profile). This was the debut novel of Selina Siak Chin Yoke, I had gotten it free from Kindle First. Let me start off with how interesting the author herself is. The Woman Who Breathed Two Worlds A fascinating story that was a incredible relatable despite the cultures and times being radically different my own.
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