The Diplomat's Daugter Karin Tanabe

Publisher: Washington Square Press
On Sale Date: July 11th 2017
Pages: 451

1941: Twenty year old Emi Kato is the daughter of a Japanese diplomat and has lived in Europe and at the time period of when the story begins, in the United States with her mother. She terribly misses her boyfriend Leo, who is back in Vienna, Austria, and from who she never heard again, she keeps wondering during the story what has happened to him.The bombing at Pearl Harbor happens, and just like every other Japanese living in the USA, Emi and her mother are placed in an internment camp in Texas.There she meets Christian Lange. Christian is from a wealthy German family who lived in the US, but just like the Japanese, every German resident is arrested and put in the same internment camps. Altough their living in imprisonment, a love blooms up between Emi and Christian.But then, all of a sudden,  Emi is send back to Japan with her mother, while Christian enlists in the US army to fight Japan.

The book switches back and forth in time periods, also when Emi and her mom lived in Vienna, where some quite graphic moments happen when at school is found out she is dating Leo, who is Jewish. The last part of the book takes the reader to Shanghai, where Leo is trying to build up a new life with his family, though he still can't forget Emi. Meanwhile, Emi is back in Japan but send away again by her father.The Japan she returns to does not resemble her young childhood. As she becomes an independent woman, apart from her parents she struggles to find home and her two loves - all the while struggling to stay alive.

The Diplomat's Daughter is a very moving and impressive novel about three young people living in the middle of the second world war. I think the impact of the war in Asia is not that much in novels as about the German part, and that's why I liked the focus point of this book. It was different then most novels about this topic, and the author also gave an insight of the impact of the war in China and that many European Jews fled to China and actually find quite a safe place there, which I didn't know. I really liked the storyline, altough there was so much happening in the last part that it became somewhat confusing.
I did like the end though, it really was a good conclusion to the book!

Overall this is a very well written book with quite an impressing story, recommend it!