The Color of Water by Kim Dong Hwa: C

colorwater-125The story of Ehwa, as begun in The Color of Earth, continues in this second volume of a trilogy. Like the first book in the series, The Color of Water is mostly about sex. Ever-curious Ehwa discovers some new things in this volume, often spurred along by crude scenes involving fields of phallic peppers or copulating animals. She also begins a romance with Duksam, a sweet-talking farmhand, and starts to understand her mother’s wistful feelings towards her own itinerant lover.

The first half of the volume is pretty listless, consisting mainly of sexual escapades interspersed with countless discussions between Ehwa and her mother in which women are compared to flowers. I singled these mother-daughter conversations out for praise in my review of volume one, but their talks have become so repetitive that now I find these same scenes to be downright tedious.

In the second half of the book, more of a narrative thread develops, as Ehwa and Duksam make some progress in their courtship and Duksam’s elderly employer decides he wants Ehwa for himself, heedless of her mother’s objections. Unfortunately, Duksam is another one that spews flowery language both literally and figuratively, so it’s hard to care much about his relationship with Ehwa.

Still, I applaud the series for not saddling Ehwa with the very first boy she ever liked and allowing her to meet and be attracted to a stranger. Of course, there is one more volume and the back cover promises a story of “first love and second chances,” so perhaps I’d do well to remember the old adage about counting chickens.

Review copy provided by the publisher. Review originally published at Manga Recon.

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Comments

  1. Danielle Leigh says

    hmmmm…I trust your judgment and yet I still wanna read it. However, I’ve got five billion other things to read so it can probably wait until the library gets it. 😉

    • Yeah, I know how you feel. Even though I know that the third and final volume will probably be just as crude in places as just as laden with flower imagery, I still want to see how it ends.

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