Year of Impossible Goodbyes is the story of a ten year old girl named Sookan and her family during 1945. The Japanese military were occupying Korea. Captain Narita does his best to destroy everything of value to the family, but cannot break their spirit. Her father is with the resistance movement in Manchuria and her brothers are in labor camps. Her mother is supervising a sock factory and Sookan and her younger brother are forced to attend Japanese school. When the war ends the family believes that they are free and everything will be good again, but Russian troops are threatening that when they come in and take control over on North Korea. Their only escape is to South Korea which is controlled by the Americans.
This story took me a little while to get into, but once I got into it, it was hard to put down. Sookan seems wise beyond her ten years of life. She is a very strong child from a very strong family. There were parts of this book that were incredibly sad and sometimes hard to read. I read many sad books when I was younger from the holocaust and they did not faze me as much. I think is just something that comes with age. When you read these kind of book when you are young you do not fully understand the sadness behind them. When you are older and have more life experience it becomes more real.
I did not love this book, but I think when you pair it with So Far From the Bamboo Grove it could make an excellent lesson. I think this book could be read anywhere from 6th-8th graders. I am not sure how children will respond to this. Some may enjoy it, while others may find in hard to read. Some may find it boring. It is hard to predict. I think it depends on the students in your class and the maturity level. It is a story that is full of history and could not only help with reading but about learning a different side to the World War II that they probably did not know.
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