Silent Honour
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4.2 • 15 Ratings
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
In August 1941 Hiroko, eighteen years old and torn between her mother's belief in ancient traditions and her father's passion for modern ideas, leaves Kyoto to come to America for an education. To Hiroko, California is a different world - a world of barbecues, station wagons and college. Her cousins in California have become more American than Japanese - and Hiroko also finds a link between her old and new worlds when she becomes friendly with Peter, her uncle's university assistant.
But on December 7 1941 Pearl Harbor is bombed by the Japanese, and within hours, war is declared. Suddenly Hiroko has become an enemy in a foreign land. Terrified, begging to go home, she is ordered by her father to stay. But as the military is empowered to remove the Japanese from their communities, Hiroko and her Californian family end up in the detention centre, where they fight to stay alive amid the drama of life and death in the camp.
This extraordinary novel creates a portrait of human tragedy and strength, divided loyalties and love. Danielle Steel portrays the human cost of that terrible time in history, as well as the remarkable courage of a people whose honour and dignity transcended the chaos that surrounded them.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The doyenne of bestseller lists weaves another romantic story in her 38th novel, a tale of separated families and shattered lives set against one of the most morally reprehensible events in U.S. history: the internment of Japanese-Americans during WW II. In 1941, 18-year-old Hiroko Takashimaya, the beautiful, painfully shy daughter of a modern-thinking professor and a tradition-bound mother, is sent from her home in Kyoto to live in California with her American cousins and attend a prestigious women's college. Terribly homesick yet determined to make her parents proud, dutiful Hiroko begins to adjust to her new life and even does the unthinkable when she falls in love with Peter Jenkins, a handsome American professor. The joys of Peter's love painfully contrast with the humiliation Hiroko suffers at the hands of her racially prejudiced school mates, but worse is to come when war breaks out and Hiroko and her cousins are sent to segregated camps. Separated from Peter, now a soldier fighting in Europe, Hiroko sheds her sheltered, girlhood innocence and evolves into a strong, independent woman. Steel's slapdash prose and stereotypical characterization produce a formulaic tale, albeit more earnest and didactic than her usual fare, but she does succeed in telling a poignant story. Major ad/promo; simultaneous BDD audio.
