Silent Honor
A Novel
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Danielle Steel, a moving novel of families separated and lives shattered by prejudice during one of the most shameful episodes in American history.
A man ahead of his time, Japanese college professor Masao Takashimaya of Kyoto had a passion for modern ideas that was as strong as his wife’s belief in ancient traditions. His eighteen-year-old daughter, Hiroko, torn between her mother’s traditions and her father’s wishes, boarded the SS Nagoya Maru to come to California for an education and to make her father proud. It was August 1941.
From the ship, she went to the Palo Alto home of her uncle, Takeo, and his family. To Hiroko, California was a different world. Her cousins had become more American than Japanese. And much to Hiroko’s surprise, Peter Jenkins, her uncle’s assistant at Stanford, became an unexpected link between her old world and her new.
On December 7, Pearl Harbor is bombed by the Japanese. Within hours, war is declared and suddenly Hiroko has become an enemy in a foreign land.
On February 19, Executive Order 9066 is signed by President Roosevelt, giving the military the power to remove the Japanese from their communities at will. Takeo and his family are given ten days to sell their home, give up their jobs, and report to a relocation center, along with thousands of other Japanese and Japanese Americans, to face their destinies there. Families are divided, people are forced to abandon their homes, their businesses, their freedom, and their lives.
Danielle Steel portrays not only the human cost of that terrible time in history, but also the remarkable courage of a people whose honor and dignity transcended the chaos that surrounded them. Silent Honor reveals the stark truth about the betrayal of Americans by their own government . . . and the triumph of a woman caught between cultures and determined to survive.
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.
Customer Reviews
One of the best books I’ve ever read
I’ve read this book at least 5 times since it was first published. This is one of the most immersive, heart-wrenching, but still feel-good stories ever. It really opened my eyes to what those of Asian descent faced in the WWII era. I’m sure it was even more horrific than the things described in this story, and my heart hurts for all those who had to suffer similar fates. Danielle really knocked it out of the park with this story.