Somebody's Daughter Book

I honestly HATED this book. It had some cultural insights at times and a different writing style than most books (since it switched back and forth from the point of views of Sarah and Kyung-sook), but the majority of the book was nonsense. Too many characters were introduced without be developed fully. ** POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT**

For instance, there are multiple minor characters in the book named Jeannie, who are only mentioned a few times in the book saying unimportant things which could have easily been replaced by any other character. Since the book was fictitious, I didn't understand why the author just didn't find another name or why she had so many. The characters she did develop had weak, corrupted personalities, which was a real problem since it made the reader not really care what happened to them. I couldn't connect with the characters. For instance, the main character, Sarah, was a failure at college mostly due to laziness than any mental or physical handicap. I absolutely hated her... if this book wasn't assigned for school, I would have given up after a few pages. She was cold to her foster parents and her sister because she envies their happiness and how they all fit in with each other while she doesn't. She let her college tuition go down the drain and is wasteful enough to throw away the food her foster family sends her in the trash, unopened. She hangs up on her American family when they call to see if she arrived alright, pretending that the phone line got disconnected. When I first began reading, I thought that Sarah's personality would gradually improve by the end of the book -- that she would have learned something from her experience. Instead, the book just went downhill.
The worst flaw of the book was the rambling content. The author frequently strayed too far away from the plot, often adding pornographic scenes which do not further the story at all, and sometimes making the reader question the sanity of the author and why she included these useless scenes. Again, there was something lacking with the characters - none of them were role models. Sarah became friends with two guys - Doug, who is half-American and half-Korean, and Jun-Ho Kim, a soldier-in-training who is eager to learn English. Sarah slept with Doug and then she suddenly decided to cheat on him one day with Jun-Ho because he was a full-Korean while Doug was biracial?!?! Does this make any sense? What is this book promoting?? She does this without either of the guys' knowledge and feels little guilt. Doug is a smoker, who ignores the fact that it is destroying his lungs, and both Doug and Jun-Ho Kim curse randomly throughout their dialogue. I failed to see how this related to the plot or theme of Korean/American culture at all. Sarah could have well searched for her mother without these additions.
Meanwhile, Kyung-sook, her mother was a little better in her youth but not much. She ran away from the university that her family had worked so hard to put her in because the other pupils told her that she smelled. The obvious solution to this would be to (1) wash your clothes or (2) to ignore them, but Kyung-sook decided that her best option would be to run away and improvise for work as she went along. She then went and got herself pregnant with an American. She was possibly better than Sarah in that she truly believed that he was going to marry her, which he never did. Since the child would be deemed illegitimate and biracial, which was inacceptable in her family circle, she considered abortion, but she found that she couldn't pay. However, Kyung-sook did decide to keep the child and grieved when she was taken away from her, so she was slightly higher in my opinion than Sarah. In all, it almost seems that the book supports illegitimacy, abortions, smoking, college dropouts, backstabbers, cursing, and love affairs. All these somehow became involved with the story of Sarah Thorston, a 19-year-old girl studying abroad, on her way to find her mother. It could have been a much improved story if the author cut back on a lot of this disturbing, unneeded information.
At the end, Sarah remained the same self-centered person to start with and possibly less honorable, which made the book have sort of a pointless finish. Nothing was accomplished by the end; there was no proper resolution, which is my opinion makes for a poor story. Sarah Thorston NEVER found her mother and NEVER learned anything from the trip... The only positive comment would be that the story included bits about culture and customs from the point of view of a foreigner (Sarah) and from the perspective of an ordinary Korean villager (Kyung-sook). In short, Somebody's Daughter was a disappointing book, one that I would definitely not recommend to anyone. The positive reviews on the book cover clearly were skewed. The one-star I give this book is grade-wise an F, similar to Sarah's grades, because that was really all it deserved.