Daughter of Molokaʻi

Alan Brennert Softcover, 301 pp. Alan Brennert’s beloved novel Moloka’i, currently has over 600,000 copies in print. This companion tale tells the story of Ruth, the daughter that Rachel Kalama ― quarantined for most of her life at the isolated leprosy settlement of Kalaupapa ― was forced to give up at birth. The book follows young Ruth from her arrival at the Kapiʻolani Home for Girls in Honolulu, to her adoption by a Japanese couple who raise her on a strawberry and grape farm in California, her marriage and unjust internment at Manzanar Relocation Camp during World War II―and then, after the war, to the life-altering day when she receives a letter from a woman who says she is Ruth’s birth mother, Rachel.