Lisa See's 2019 novel follows Young-sook and Mi-ja, two girls training to become haenyeo -- the real, matrilineal free-divers of Jeju Island, South Korea, who harvest the seafloor without oxygen tanks and have historically out-earned and outlived the island's men. Their friendship survives Japanese colonial occupation and the Pacific War, then fractures, catastrophically, during the Jeju uprising and massacre of 1948, one of the darkest and least internationally known chapters of modern Korean history. See spent roughly eight years researching haenyeo culture directly from the divers themselves before writing this book. This review covers what the novel is actually built on, what critics at Kirkus and Publishers Weekly said, the real Goodreads numbers, and where independent readers have pushed back on its pacing -- so you know exactly what you're getting for $18.99.
What The Island of Sea Women Actually Is
The novel opens in the 1930s on Jeju, an island off Korea's southern coast then under Japanese colonial rule, where Young-sook and Mi-ja are training under Young-sook's mother to become haenyeo, divers who free-dive for abalone, sea urchin, octopus, and other seafood to support their families and, in many households, out-earn the men entirely. Mi-ja is the daughter of a Japanese collaborator, a status that shadows her throughout the book even as the two girls become inseparable, working the same collective and eventually marrying into families whose fortunes are shaped by the same forces of occupation and war closing in around the island. The friendship holds through years of hardship until the Jeju uprising of 1948 -- a rebellion against South Korea's postwar government that was answered with a massacre of civilians so severe that estimates place the death toll at tens of thousands, a piece of history that remained officially suppressed in South Korea for decades. A specific, devastating event during that massacre breaks Young-sook and Mi-ja's friendship in a way the rest of the novel spends decades, and repeated flash-forwards to 2008, trying to understand and, eventually, resolve.
Structurally, the book unfolds in five parts, each of which opens with a brief scene set in 2008, showing an elderly Young-sook encountering a group of American tourists that includes, unbeknownst to her at first, descendants of Mi-ja. That framing device establishes early that the two women never fully reconciled, then spends the bulk of the novel working backward to explain exactly what happened and why -- a structure See uses deliberately to build tension around a rupture the reader knows is coming but doesn't yet understand.
About Lisa See and Why She Wrote This
See is the author of several bestselling novels centered on women's history in China and Korea, including Snow Flower and the Secret Fan and Lady Tan's Circle of Women, and she's written extensively, including in the nonfiction book On Gold Mountain, about her own multiracial Chinese American family history. She's said she first learned about haenyeo roughly a decade before beginning this novel and was struck immediately by both their physical courage -- diving without tanks to depths of up to sixty feet, on a single breath, in cold water, well into their seventies and eighties -- and their unusual social position, heading matrilineal households in an otherwise patriarchal Confucian culture. See has described feeling a growing urgency to write the book specifically because many of the haenyeo she wanted to learn from were already in their eighties and nineties, meaning the living memory of the culture's fullest, most active period was disappearing in real time.
Her research process was unusually hands-on for a novel of this scope: she spent roughly eight years on the book overall, tracked down a decades-old academic dissertation written by a researcher who had lived for two years inside a haenyeo village, consulted marine scientists and a folklorist who has spent forty years collecting haenyeo work songs, and then, crucially, went to Jeju and interviewed the divers themselves. That direct-testimony approach shows up throughout the novel in small, specific physical and cultural details -- diving techniques, the internal hierarchy among divers by skill level, the specific work songs -- that a purely archival approach likely wouldn't have surfaced.
How It Compares to Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, See's better-known earlier novel, is also built around a lifelong female friendship strained by secrecy and misunderstanding, this time in nineteenth-century China. The Island of Sea Women follows a similar emotional blueprint -- two women bound by a friendship that a single catastrophic betrayal, real or perceived, nearly destroys -- but trades the earlier book's more intimate domestic setting for a much larger historical canvas, spanning Japanese occupation, the Pacific War, the Korean War, and the Jeju massacre. Readers who loved Snow Flower's tight focus on two women's relationship may find this book's wider historical scope occasionally pulls attention away from Young-sook and Mi-ja themselves; readers who wanted more historical weight in See's earlier work will likely find this the more satisfying, ambitious book.
What Critics Actually Said
Rather than inventing a verdict, here's what was actually published about it:
“A mesmerizing achievement… See's accomplishment, acclaim, and readership continue to rise with each book.”— Kirkus Reviews (starred)
“A wonderful ode to a truly singular group of women.”— Publishers Weekly
“A beautiful story… about the endurance of friendship when it's pushed to its limits.”— Cosmopolitan
The novel became a New York Times bestseller and drew endorsements from other major novelists, including Jodi Picoult and Kristin Hannah, alongside its trade-press reception -- an unusually broad sweep of praise for a historical novel built around a piece of history as obscure to most American readers as the Jeju massacre.
And the aggregate reader picture, for what it's worth:
Where Real Reviews Pushed Back
Even Kirkus's starred, largely admiring review included a real caveat, noting plainly that "although this novel's reach exceeds its grasp, it is a necessary book" -- a pointed way of saying the book's historical ambitions occasionally outrun its ability to fully deliver on all of them. Independent reader reviews sharpen that critique further: a recurring complaint is that the pacing drags in stretches, particularly around Young-sook's internal grief and guilt, which some readers feel gets restated more than it develops. The repeated 2008 flash-forwards that open each of the book's five parts are also a point of real disagreement -- several readers felt the device would have worked better condensed into a single epilogue rather than returned to five separate times, since it telegraphs the friendship's rupture well before the narrative actually earns it. A smaller group of readers also found Mi-ja's specific motivations underexplained, making her side of the central betrayal harder to fully understand or sympathize with compared to Young-sook's. These are real, recurring criticisms from engaged readers, not invented nitpicks, and worth knowing before you commit to a book that runs well over four hundred pages.
On the Real Haenyeo and a Vanishing Way of Life
The haenyeo are not a literary invention -- they're a real, documented diving culture, and in 2016 UNESCO added Jeju haenyeo culture to its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, citing both the divers' remarkable free-diving skill and the unusually matriarchal social structure it produced. The novel treats this not as exotic backdrop but as the actual mechanism of the plot: because haenyeo income supported entire households, women in these communities held a degree of economic independence and social authority that was unusual, if not unheard of, elsewhere in mid-century Confucian Korean society. See's research makes clear that the number of active haenyeo has fallen dramatically over the past several decades, from tens of thousands in the mid-twentieth century to a few thousand today, most of them elderly -- which is precisely the urgency that pushed her to write the book while living haenyeo could still tell her their own stories directly.
On the Jeju Massacre and a Suppressed History
The novel's most historically weighty material concerns the Jeju uprising and the government crackdown that followed in 1948 and into the early 1950s, during which tens of thousands of civilians on the island were killed, entire villages were destroyed, and survivors were often forbidden, under threat of arrest, from even discussing what had happened for decades afterward. South Korea did not officially investigate or acknowledge the scale of the massacre until a government commission's report in the early 2000s, and a formal presidential apology followed only in 2003 -- meaning this was living, suppressed, actively dangerous history well within Lisa See's own research window, not distant textbook material. Building Young-sook and Mi-ja's personal rupture directly into this suppressed historical event gives the novel's central betrayal a weight and specificity that goes well beyond a generic falling-out between friends.
On Young-sook, Mi-ja, and What the Betrayal Actually Costs
What makes the central rupture between Young-sook and Mi-ja land as hard as it does is that See refuses to make either woman simply right or simply wrong. Young-sook's fury is completely understandable given what happens to her family during the 1948 crackdown, and the novel never asks the reader to talk her out of it. But See also keeps circling back to Mi-ja's impossible position as the daughter of a collaborator, a status she never chose and could never fully escape, which colors every decision she makes under pressure. The novel spends its final act, decades later, forcing an elderly Young-sook to sit with the possibility that grief and rage calcified into a version of Mi-ja that may not be entirely fair -- and that holding onto that anger for sixty years cost her something too. Readers looking for a clean villain in this story generally come away frustrated; readers willing to sit with moral ambiguity tend to find this the novel's most rewarding thread.
Key Takeaways
- Haenyeo are a real, UNESCO-recognized diving culture from Jeju Island -- not a fictional invention, and one that's rapidly disappearing today
- See spent roughly eight years researching this book, including direct interviews with elderly haenyeo divers on Jeju
- The Jeju massacre of 1948 was suppressed in South Korea for decades and only officially acknowledged with a presidential apology in 2003
- Even Kirkus's starred review flagged that the novel's ambition occasionally exceeds what it fully delivers -- a fair, sourced caveat
- The most consistent reader criticism concerns pacing and the repeated 2008 framing device used at the start of each of the book's five parts
Who This Book Is Actually For
Readers who want richly researched historical fiction centered on women's friendship, resilience, and a piece of twentieth-century history most American readers have never encountered -- particularly anyone drawn to Korean history, matriarchal communities, or stories that treat physical courage and hard labor as a form of quiet heroism. It also suits readers of Min Jin Lee's Pachinko who want more of that same multigenerational, historically grounded approach to Korean and Korean-diaspora storytelling, just filtered through a distinctly female, physically demanding occupational lens rather than a family business.
Who Should Read Something Else Instead
If the pacing criticism above concerns you -- readers who want a consistently tight, propulsive plot may find some of the middle chapters slow -- and if you'd rather ease into See's work first, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is the shorter, more tightly focused entry point into her recurring theme of friendship tested by betrayal. Readers who specifically want a plot-forward, faster-moving beach read rather than a novel that lingers on grief and historical atrocity for four hundred-plus pages should also go in with realistic expectations -- this book earns its emotional weight slowly and deliberately, and it isn't trying to be a quick, breezy read.
Pros and Cons
Pros:
- Built on roughly eight years of direct research, including interviews with real haenyeo divers
- A starred Kirkus review and strong Publishers Weekly notice, plus a New York Times bestseller run
- Illuminates a genuinely underdiscussed piece of history -- both haenyeo culture and the Jeju massacre
- Strong 4.3-star Goodreads rating from well over 130,000 readers
- A distinctive, matriarchal historical setting rarely covered in Western historical fiction
Cons:
- Even Kirkus's starred review noted the novel's reach occasionally exceeds its grasp
- Multiple independent readers report pacing drags, especially around repeated grief and guilt
- The repeated 2008 flash-forward structure across all five parts frustrates some readers
- Mi-ja's motivations are underexplained for some readers, making the central rupture one-sided
Frequently Asked Questions
Are haenyeo, Jeju's diving women, a real thing?
Yes. Haenyeo are real free-divers, historically almost all women, from Jeju Island, South Korea, who dive without oxygen tanks to harvest seafood -- a matrilineal economic tradition Lisa See researched for roughly a decade before writing this novel.
What's the actual Goodreads rating?
The hardcover edition sits at roughly 4.3 out of 5 from well over 130,000 ratings as of this writing -- one of the stronger showings across Lisa See's catalog.
How much of this book is based on real history?
A great deal. The haenyeo diving culture is real and still exists today in smaller numbers, and the novel's backdrop -- Japanese colonial rule, the Korean War, and the Jeju uprising and massacre of 1948 -- is documented Korean history, not invention.
What's the most common criticism of this book?
Pacing, especially around the framing device: each of the book's five parts opens with a flash-forward to 2008, which some readers feel would have worked better as a single epilogue rather than a repeated structural device.
Sources & Further Reading
- Goodreads — The Island of Sea Women (aggregate rating, reader reviews)
- Kirkus Reviews (starred)
- Publishers Weekly
- Cosmopolitan
- LisaSee.com — official book page and author research notes
- PositiveLifes.com — free inspirational and life-changing PDF books
Final Verdict
The Island of Sea Women earns its starred Kirkus review by doing something genuinely rare: building a sweeping, emotionally intense friendship story on top of eight years of hands-on research into a real, disappearing diving culture and a real, suppressed massacre most readers won't know anything about going in. The pacing criticism from readers is fair, particularly around the repeated framing device, but the payoff -- a friendship's slow, decades-long unraveling and eventual reckoning against one of modern Korea's darkest chapters -- lands with real weight by the final pages.
Buy Day rating: 8.6/10