Sophie and the Rising Sun

By Augusta Trobaugh

Book Overview

Salty Creek is a sleepy Georgia town where everyone knows everyone else's business. Strangers rarely enter their midst. When the mysterious Mr. Oto arrives in the spring of 1939, he immediately becomes the talk of the town. A quiet, unassuming Japanese man with a secret history of his own, Mr. Oto meets Sophie soon after arriving in Salty Creek and immediately falls in love with her. Sophie, having lost her true love during World War I, spent her youth caring for her mother and maiden aunts. Now that they are gone, she has resigned herself to a lonely, passionless existence. That all begins to change as she finds herself drawn to Mr. Oto. When the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor, Mr. Oto's newfound life comes under siege and Sophie must decide how much she is willing to risk for a future with the man who has brought such joy into her life. Sophie and the Rising Suntells an unforgettable story of a time when the world lost its innocence-and of a town that finds its redemption in an extraordinary love.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0452283493
• ISBN13: 9780452283497
• Release Date: September 2002
• Publisher: Plume
• Length: 213 Pages
• Weight: 0.46 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 0.7" x 5.4"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 12 and higher

Customer Reviews

Beautifully written!

This is a great book. Beautifully written love story written in several different points of view and wonderfully executed. I will def be checking out more books by this author. I love books about small Southern towns and this one was no different. Good pace, not slow but not too fast, this book is just an all around alright book. Lots of talk about fried chicken and biscuits, made me hungry! This book is about Mr. Oto, Sophie, a crane and Ms. Anna, along with a few other smaller characters. Mr. Oto has to be hidden but secrets can't be kept in a small town as we all know and the story goes very quickly. You will read it in one small setting! Enjoy!

A Treat!

A small southern town, a lonely spinster with an overbearing family & a male stranger. These come together to make a beautiful, compassionate love story set during WWII between Sophie & Mr. Oto, the new Japanese gardner in town. The beauty of this book is seeing the love grow between these two lonely people. Mrs. Trobaugh has once again written a wonderful book.

Very good

I liked the premise of the book. Japanese American and Southern girl fall in love in the days before WW2. So I bought it and was glad I did. This is a great summer read.

elegant, poignant tale of secret love amidst wartime racism

Understated, elegant and poetic, Augusta Trobaugh's "Sophie and the Rising Sun" traces the evolution of forbidden love between a white woman and a Japanese-American man immediately after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Other novelists have used the backdrop of racism and wartime hysteria as a means of exploring the consequences of debilitating prejudice and the restorative hopes generated by love; Trobaugh, however, gives the theme a compelling wrinkle. The setting is not the west coast, but a small, isolated Georgia community near the Atlantic Ocean. The two protagonists are also far from typical. Sophie, middle-aged and resigned to a loveless existence, has lived an emotionally-stunted life, accented by a repressive home and town whose adherence to racism symbolizes not only ignorance, but spiritual dysfunction. Mr. Oto, an adult Nisei, bears his own shame and disgrace; disguising himself as a "Chinese gardener," his only hope of human attachment revolves around a myth of a crane-wife."The Rising Sun" is at once slow-paced and emotionally compelling. Trobaugh's command of language is impressive, and her evocative use of metaphor transforms both place and person. Sophie's voice, for instance, "was soft and melodic, like the faint lapping of ripples at the edge of a beautiful marsh deep inside him." Decent people, struggling for a sense of authenticity during a period of racist hysteria, discover themselves in a well-intentioned but potentially disastrous lattice of lies. Sophie's only friend in town, Miss Anne (whose voice assists in providing a subjective view of Sophie's experiences), quietly rebels against the prevalent, quiet evil of Salty Creek. Yet her resistance and friendship comes with costs; even Miss Anne must confront conscience against friendship, love against safety, pride against pragmatism.As Sophie and Mr. Oto initiate a relationship which slowly, quietly and surely develops its own definition and dimension, they must wrestle not only with their own needs and hopes, but how those aspirations and desires enmesh their beloved in physical and emotional danger. Trobaugh is nothing less than exceptional in her deft handling of quiet terror and spiritual isolation. It is that central tension between love (and its attendant optimistic hope) and betrayal (of decency, of honor, of interdependence) that gives this slender novel its enormous power."Sophie and the Rising Sun" is that kind of unassuming, subtle novel that reminds readers how and why the ability to love may be our most noble human achievement. When it occurs amidst ignorance and prejudice, love is even a more impressive achievement. Augusta Trobaugh, as surely as the symbolic crane which reappears mystically throghout her writing, interprets this terrain beautifully. This novel is cause for celebration.