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Fifty Words for Rain
Do you ever sit down with a book you're not really in the mood for ... and then get completely swept up in the story, wondering how you could ever NOT wanted to read it? That was me with this book. In the opening pages, Nori's mother drops her at her aristocratic grandparent's doorstep with a small suitcase and a note. Nori has never met these grandparents. To them, Nori represents only shame, because she was born out of wedlock to their married daughter and an African American GI. Their treatment of Nori is appalling; she's rarely allowed out of her room. But then one day her half-brother Akira comes to live on their estate, and when he shows Nori the faintest glimmer of love and friendship, her solitary world begins to crack open. A heartbreaking and beautiful coming of age story, though I didn't get the ending I wanted or hoped for.
About the Book
A Good Morning America Book Club Pick and New York Times Bestseller!
From debut author Asha Lemmie, “a lovely, heartrending story about love and loss, prejudice and pain, and the sometimes dangerous, always durable ties that link a family together.”—Kristin Hannah, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Nightingale
Kyoto, Japan, 1948. “Do not question. Do not fight. Do not resist.”
Such is eight-year-old Noriko “Nori” Kamiza’s first lesson. She will not question why her mother abandoned her with only these final words. She will not fight her confinement to the attic of her grandparents’ imperial estate. And she will not resist the scalding chemical baths she receives daily to lighten her skin.
The child of a married Japanese aristocrat and her African American GI lover, Nori is an outsider from birth. Her grandparents take her in, only to conceal her, fearful of a stain on the royal pedigree that they are desperate to uphold in a changing Japan. Obedient to a fault, Nori accepts her solitary life, despite her natural intellect and curiosity. But when chance brings her older half-brother, Akira, to the estate that is his inheritance and destiny, Nori finds in him an unlikely ally with whom she forms a powerful bond—a bond their formidable grandparents cannot allow and that will irrevocably change the lives they were always meant to lead. Because now that Nori has glimpsed a world in which perhaps there is a place for her after all, she is ready to fight to be a part of it—a battle that just might cost her everything.
Spanning decades and continents, Fifty Words for Rain is a dazzling epic about the ties that bind, the ties that give you strength, and what it means to be free.
Other books in the "Quick Lit October 2020"
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