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When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka
On a sunny day in Berkeley, California, in 1942, a woman sees a sign in a post office window, returns to her home, 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 are about to be uprooted from their home and sent to a dusty internment camp in the Utah desert.
In this lean and devastatingly evocative first novel, Julie Otsuka tells their story from five flawlessly realized points of view and conveys the exact emotional texture of their experience: the thin-walled barracks and barbed-wire fences, the omnipresent fear and loneliness, the unheralded 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.
Review from Library Journal:
Julie Otsuka's commanding debut novel. The family is separated when the FBI arrest the husband on conspiracy charges, and the mother and her two children move into an internment camp. As life falls apart for them in the filthy camps, the young daughter tells her brother bedtime stories to keep the horror at bay, and they get rare news of their father through blacked-out letters. After the war, when the family is finally reunited, the father tells his own story with muffled anger and shattering grace.
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