The following version of this book was used to create this guide: Brennert, Alan. Daughter of Molokai’i. St Martin’s Griffin, 2019.

Daughter of Moloka’i is set in two primary locations: Hawai’i and California during the twentieth century. It is written in the past tense told in the third person. As this work of historical fiction opens, the protagonist, Ruth, is being taken as an infant to an orphanage for girls whose parents are being held in captivity at Kalaupapa because they have leprosy. Ruth was born at Kalaupapa, but since she showed no symptoms for her first year, it is deemed she is healthy and can be adopted. She is cared for by Franciscan sisters at the orphanage, and one in particular, Sister Louisa, takes good care of her. While at the orphanage, Ruth befriends a dog who she names Only. She is not allowed to keep this dog because it is against orphanage rules, but this makes Ruth extremely upset because she relates to the dog because she believes the dog is alone as well.

After being rejected by a couple of families, Ruth is adopted by Etsuko and Taizo Watanabe. They adopt her even though having any leprosy in lineage is considered the blackest of marks on a Japanese family’s honor. They purposefully adopt someone associated with the colony to pay back an old debt to someone named Dai who cared for Taizo when he was deathly ill with pneumonia. This woman contracted leprosy. Ruth is happy with her family in Hawai’i, but the family moves to California when Jiro, Taizo’s brother, says he has a lot of land and is willing to give half of it to Horace, Taizo’s oldest son, if they come to California. When the family gets to California, they realize that Jiro is in considerable debt and can only harvest the crops if Taizo and his family do it. Ruth grows up and marries a man named Frank Harada. She is rejected by her first love because his family did not like that she was half-Hawaiian. Prior to that, she stopped tutoring a white boy because her own family was upset that she was spending so much time with a white boy.

Pearl Harbor is attacked, and Japanese people living in America, including the Watanabe family, are sent to camps. The family ultimately ends up at the Manzanar Camp. They do their best to clean up their rooms and make their life as beautiful as possible, but they all feel shame for where they are. The men find jobs. Taizo works in the fields but collapses due to heat, and he no longer goes out to work because he is ashamed of collapsing in front of the younger men. Ruth’s brother Ralph gets a job at a camp newspaper which puts him in danger. Eventually the government decides to enlist Nisei, American born Japanese men, and all the adults in the camp are asked if they are loyal to the United States and if they deny any allegiance to Japan. Taizo refuses to renounce his ties to Japan, and he is sent to Tule Lake Segregation Center. There he is beaten and dies of pneumonia.

Ruth and what remains of her family head back to California. There, she gets a letter from Rachel, her birth mother, and Ruth learns that she was given up for adoption because her parents had leprosy. Etsuko explains that they did not tell her this because she would have been rejected by many Japanese people and may not even have been able to get married had people known. Rachel and Ruth form a relationship, and both of Ruth’s mothers become close. Eventually Etsuko develops heart disease and dies a slow death. A while later, Rachel dies from the effects of the sulfa drugs she takes to keep the leprosy away. She did not want Ruth to have to watch another mother die, so she returns to Kalaupapa to be nursed there until her death. When she dies, Ruth and Peggy go to Hawai’i for the funeral, and Ruth goes to the land where the orphanage was. There, she reunites with the pain she experienced losing Only, and she remembers the sister who took care of her. The novel ends as Ruth feels whole for the first time ever.