Title: When the Emperor Was DivineAuthor: Julie Otsuka
I remember reading Farewell to Manzanar in middle school and being horrified that the US government imprisoned Japanese American during WWII. Then I read Snow Falling on Cedars as a young adult, and felt dismayed Guterson's picture of reassimilation after people returned to their h omes. In When the Emperor Was Divine, Otsuka shows, with painfully beautiful, spare writing, one family's experience with their father's arrest, being forced from their home in Berkeley, living in the Utah desert for several years, and finally returning to their home and trying to put their lives together. On the one hand, Otsuka goes into great personalized detail, describing things like the cold plums in the icebox that the mother in the family eats in an opening chapter or the suits that the father wears. On the other hand, she doesn't ever name any of the characters-- they're simply "the girl," "the boy," etc... making them, in a sense, both individualized characters and representative of all people who suffered in the internment camps. It's a short, easy book, and a solid, powerful story worth reading.
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