When the Emperor Was Divine

by Julie Otsuka

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I liked it, it was a good history lesson, about what happened to the Japanese in America during WW2. It was a little choppy, But supper fast, and told the story from the adult and child perspective. I maybe would have liked it to be a little longer, to finish a little more of the story...

Would I recommend it? um... maybe to someone who needs an airplane book.

Julie Otsuka’s commanding debut novel paints a portrait of the Japanese internment camps unlike any we have ever seen. With crystalline intensity and precision, Otsuka uses a single family to evoke the deracination—both physical and emotional—of a generation of Japanese Americans. In five chapters, each flawlessly executed from a different point of view—the mother receiving the order to evacuate; the daughter on the long train ride to the camp; the son in the desert encampment; the family’s return to their home; and the bitter release of the father after more than four years in captivity—she has created a small tour de force, a novel of unrelenting economy and suppressed emotion. Spare, intimate, arrestingly understated, When the Emperor Was Divine is a haunting evocation of a family in wartime and an unmistakably resonant lesson for our times. It heralds the arrival of a singularly gifted new novelist.