Opening in 1948, eight year old Noriko, the illegitimate, mixed race daughter of a Japanese aristocratic mother and a black American GI, is left at the gate of her aristocratic grandparents' home by her mother. I have to admit though, that if I have no interest in tv soap operas, I am only marginally more interested in book soap operas. Asha Lemmie's debut novel, Fifty Words for Rain, is the book version of a soap opera and it has garnered its share of supporters and detractors, just as the tv shows do. They aren't really my thing but I think what keeps people tuning in every day is the pace of the story, the complications, the constant drama, secrets and their shocking reveals, love, and of course, their outlandishness, all of which serve to take the viewer away from their quotidian life. I've never been much of a tv watcher but even I have seen an episode or two of soap operas over the years.

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 try to break free'- … ( more) 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. But when chance brings her legitimate older half-brother, Akira, to the estate that is his inheritance and destiny, Nori finds in him the first person who will allow her to question, and the siblings form an unlikely but powerful bond-a bond their formidable grandparents cannot allow and that will irrevocably change the lives they were always meant to lead. Obedient to a fault, Nori accepts her solitary life for what it is, despite her natural intellect and nagging curiosity about what lies outside the attic's walls. Though her grandparents take her in, they do so only to conceal her, fearful of a stain on the royal pedigree that they are desperate to uphold in a changing Japan. The illegitimate child of a Japanese aristocrat and her African American GI lover, Nori is an outsider from birth. And she will not resist the scalding chemical baths she receives daily to lighten her shameful skin. She will not fight her confinement to the attic of her grandparents' imperial estate. She will not question why her mother abandoned her with only these final words. Do not resist.' Such is eight-year-old Noriko 'Nori' Kamiza's first lesson. 'If a woman knows nothing else, she should know how to be silent. 'From debut author Asha Lemmie, a sweeping, heartrending coming-of-age novel about a young woman's quest for acceptance-and the unexpected ally that will change everything-in post-World War II Japan.

Fifty Words for Rain by Asha Lemmie