When a young Korean girl known as Regret leaves her homeland for a better life in Hawaii, as a "picture bride," she expects to find prosperity and a chance at education. But the rich husband she is promised turns out to be a poor plantation worker with drinking and gambling problems, and the girl now known as Jin is forced to seek her own path. Joining with her fellow picture brides to start a business, Jin must shed her naieveté and overcome prejudice...

This companion tale to Moloka'i 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 Kapi'olani 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...

Honolulu is the richly imagined story of Jin, a young "picture bride" who leaves her native Korea -- where girls are so little valued that she is known as Regret -- and journeys to Hawaii in 1914 in search of a better life. Instead of the prosperous young husband and the chance at an education she has been promised, Jin is quickly married off to a poor, embittered laborer who takes his disappointments out on his new wife, forcing her to make her own...