Алан Бреннерт

The story of a young immigrant bride in a ramshackle town that becomes a great modern city “In Korea in those days, newborn girls were not deemed important enough to be graced with formal names, but were instead given nicknames, which often reflected the parents’ feelings on the birth of a daughter: I knew a girl named Anger, and another called Pity. As for me, my parents named me Regret.” ...

God is not the State, and the State is not God. Defiance of God's self-styled interpreters is not denial of God. I will serve Him in my own ways. By day I shal wear the holy cloth... and by night I will wear a different kind of cloth... a darker shade of vestments.

This richly imagined novel, set in Hawai'i more than a century ago, is an extraordinary epic of a little-known time and place - and a deeply moving testament to the resiliency of the human spirit. Rachel Kalama, a spirited seven-year-old Hawaiian girl, dreams of visiting far-off lands like her father, a merchant seaman. Then one day a rose-colored mark appears on her skin, and those dreams a...