Daughter of Moloka'i

Ruth is the daughter that Rachel Kalama — quarantined for most of her life at the isolated leprosy settlement of Kalaupapa on the island of Moloka'i — was forced to give up at birth. This companion novel to Alan Brennert's Moloka'i follows Ruth from her early childhood at the Kapi'olani Home for Girls in Honolulu, through her adoption by a Japanese American couple who raise her on a farm in California, to her marriage and unjust internment at the Manzanar Relocation Camp during World War II. After the war, a letter arrives from a woman who says she is Ruth's birth mother, setting in motion a reunion neither woman expected. Set against the backdrop of Hawaiian and Japanese American history across the twentieth century, it traces the twenty-two-year relationship between two women who never thought they would meet.