Moloka'i by Alan Brennert

() What's it like to be a leper? To be shunned and abandoned by family and friends? This work of historical fiction helps us better see what this kind of life might have been like.

The narrative follows the main character, Rachel, from her early childhood - when she was first diagnosed as a leper - to her exiled adulthood in Kalaupapa. Here, she marries, works, grows up and old, and even gives birth. Unfortunately, she is forced to give her baby up for adoption. The government requires this so as to prevent the baby's contraction of the illness.

From Kalaupapa, Rachel mostly only hears about great inventions and historical events. Many of her acquaintances die off, including her husband, whom is murdered in a defensive brawl. Eventually, when Rachel has become quite old, a preventative and helpful medicine is created to combat leprosy. With this, Rachel is eventually tested negative for leprosy and is allowed to leave Kalaupapa, where she has been stuck most of her life. From here, she steps into the real world where she must re-learn many things and be shocked with what she didn't already know.

"And she bid me to look out on the lawn at the leper girls who were running on lame feet, playing croquet with crippled hands. 'There is beauty,' she said, 'in the least beautiful of things.'" (pg. 82)
"But when she got back from school that afternoon she saw that Violet's bed was empty, the mattress stripped of its linens. And as the days went by without Violet, Rachel understood what she couldn't comprehend at the king's funeral - feeling an absence even worse than that of her distant family, an absence that was like a sore that wouldn't heal." (pg. 92)
"'Isn't it strange.' [...] 'how one so afraid of contracting a fatal malady... should so earnestly wish for death, as well?' There it was, just as she herself had described it: the descent into a black mood, like a swimmer sinking into tar." (pg. 95)
"Fear is good. In the right degree it prevents us from making fools of ourselves. But in the wrong measure it prevents us from fully living. Fear is our boon companion but never our master." (pg. 205)
"Her husband's sutured eye looked up at her, open in death as it had been in sleep, as Rachel's tears fell on his face and commingled with his blood: the last thing they would ever share." (pg. 302)
"She'd been prepared to lose Kenji to leprosy, but not to this. Not to anger and hatred - a hatred which had infected her in turn, for she was possessed by an incendiary fury which she could not imagine would ever be extinguished." (pg. 304)
"I've come to believe that how we choose to live with pain, or injustice, or death... is the true measure of the Divine within us. Some, like Crossen, choose to do harm to themselves and others. Others, like Kenji, bear up under their pain and help others bear it." (pg. 307)