num_pages: 160
description: A precise, understated gem of a first novel, Julie Otsuka's When the Emperor Was Divine tells one Japanese American family's story of internment in a Utah enemy alien camp during World War II. We never learn the names of the young boy and girl who were forced to leave their Berkeley home in 1942 and spend over three years in a dusty, barren desert camp with their mother. Occasional, heavily censored letters arrive from their father, who had been taken from their house in his slippers by the FBI one night and was being held in New Mexico, his fate uncertain. But even after the war, when they have been reunited and are putting their stripped, vandalized house back together, the family can never regain its pre-war happiness. Broken by circumstance and prejudice, they will continue to pay, in large and small ways, for the shape of their eyes. When the Emperor Was Divine is written in deceptively tranquil prose, a distillation of injustice, anger, and poetry; a notable debut. --Regina Marler
language: English
title: When the Emperor Was Divine
titlecomplete: When the Emperor Was Divine (Om)
genres: Fiction, Historical, War, Asia, Japan, School, Adult, Adult Fiction, Historical Fiction, World War II
ratings_count: 25502
places: California, Utah
awards: awardedAt: 1041408000000
name: Orange Prize
category: Fiction Longlist, awardedAt: 1041408000000
name: ALA Alex Award, awardedAt: 1641024000000
name: Phoenix Award (Children's Literature Association)
publisher: Viking