Fifty Words for Rain

 Fifty Words for Rain by Asha Lemmie, 449 pages.

Nori Kamiza's first and most important rule in life is to obey. So when she is left at her grandparents' house at the age of eight she does not resist. She is subjected to years of isolation in the attic, burning chemical lightening baths, and general physical abuse not only for being the bastard daughter of a Japanese aristocratic family, but for being visibly mixed race (a particularly embarrassing thing for a noble family in Kyoto in 1948). This persists for years with no resistance on Nori's part until her half-brother comes to live with them, and the two form an inseparable bond. He begins to teach her some of the joy that can be found in life, but nevertheless tragedy follows them.

I was unfortunately very disappointed in this book. As a series of increasingly improbably terrible things happen to Nori, it feels less and less like a cohesive narrative and more like a game of trying to figure out how terrible things could conceivably be for our protagonists. Most of the characters felt pretty two-dimensional, which only made it more evident when they acted out of character to further the tragedies. Finally, a sort of nit-picky detail, but I couldn't get over how strange it felt that the protagonist's very traditional family is Christian, without ever acknowledging that Christianity is a pretty rare religion in Japan. Especially in the 1940s and 50s Christianity probably would have read as more American than Nori's dark skin. This is a small issue, but it does feel like it feeds into the larger issue of this book under-utilizing it's own setting. 

(Also, as a warning, this book has pretty much every common trigger warning common in books about violence against women)