Trust & Obey

Hey guys! I hope your first weekend of 2021 has been great and you’re feeling optimistic about the new year. Saturday, I finished the novel by Kristina McMorris The Bridge of Scarlet Leaves (kind of a close call!) and I cranked out this review just about as soon as I finished it. Usually, I am ahead of the game, however, this week I had a family get together to celebrate Christmas/the New Year and it was pretty awesome. Anyways, you aren’t here to listen to me talk about that stuff, we are here for books! So, without further ado, here’s The Bridge of Scarlet Leaves!

McMorris’s novel focuses around the Star-Crossed lovers Madeline Kern and Lane Moritomo during the World War II era and the dilemma they face as two people from two races.

This book shines a light on an element of history that isn’t brought up very frequently. I hadn’t heard about the Japanese American point of view during WWII. The suspicion of their neighbors and country when many Japanese immigrants did nothing wrong. It was fascinating to learn about what went down in the United States instead of Germany or Japan.

I also found it very interesting learning about how overly involved the Government became during this time. According to McMorris, government officials literally ripped Japanese families from their homes and placed them in holding camps but not before going through everything in their houses. She also mentioned that the newspapers were telling everyone to hate the Japanese because of the bombing of Pearl Harbor even though the whole race was not responsible for the bombing. What happened to innocent until proven guilty?

The largest issue I had here was there were multiple sections I had to skip. I can’t tell you exactly if these parts were legitimate sex scenes or not- because I skipped over them- but they got far too sensual for me. For those of you who have read Francine Rivers’ works the level of sexual tension is maybe a smidge more compared to Rivers’ books. I would like to point out, though, that the scenes that were sexual were between a married couple. I understand that this is a part of marriage but especially as an unmarried woman I felt very uncomfortable and awkward. My final comment would be that this does also having swearing. There were no F-bombs but a decent number of other ones including God’s name in vain.

All-in-all, The Bridge of Scarlet Leaves was a great adult historical fiction romance centering around a very difficult time for both Japanese Americans and Americans. I would like to point out I am not a big fan of romance novels but I adore anything on WWII so I was very neutral on this book. I was highly impressed by McMorris’ research for this novel and the time she took to really grasp this era. She even has a spot where she mentions the articles she based the book one which I loved!

Do you have a favorite historical fiction novel? Let me know in the comments!