Emi Kato has lived all over the world. As the only daughter of a Japanese diplomat, the Kato family has been stationed in Berlin, London, Vienna and America. Emi is a beautiful, talented, multi-lingual young woman whose life turns upside down during WWII. The Kato family thought they were safely tucked away in Washington DC, but when Pearl Harbor is bombed, the Japanese are quickly the enemy and are sent to internment camps, stripped of all their freedoms and slowly returned to Japan. At the tender age of 21, Emi has fallen in love twice and these friendship/romances have pulled her heart in every direction possible. In Vienna, Leo Hartmann’s family has been destroyed and removed from everything they have ever known and Christian Lange, a wealthy American boy of German descent whose family is also detained, is no longer welcome on American soil. Emi does not know who to trust anymore. The Japan she returns to does not resemble her young childhood, Christians family could not be part of the same Nazi Germany she despises and the Americans have completely withdrawn any diplomatic welcome they once extended. As Emi becomes an independent woman, apart from her parents she searches to find home and her two loves - all the while struggling to stay alive. I really liked each character in this somewhat long, repetitive saga. Its a solid good but did not knock my socks off as author Karin Tanabe’s The Gilded Years had done last year.
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