"On a sunny day in Berkeley, Callifornia, in 1942, a women sees a sign in a post office window, returns to her house, and matter-of-factly begins to pack her family's possessions. Like thousands of other Japanese Americans they have been reclassified, virtually overnight, as enemy aliens and about to be uprooted from their home and sent to a dusty internment camp in the Utah desert.
In this lean and devastingly evocative first novel, Julie Otsuka tellas their story from five flawlessly realized points of view and conveys the exact emotional texture of their experience: the thin-walled baffacks and barbed-wire fences, the omnipresent fear and loneliness, the ubheralded feats of heroism. When the Emperor Was Divine is a work of enormous power that makes a shameful episode of our history as immediate as today's headlines.'
An interesting, if not really engaging, book. I found myself dwelling on what has happened to refugee boat people in our own society.
ReplyDelete