Rating: 
Summary: Not bad...but not good, either.
Review: After exhausting all the European countries for characters and storylines, Danielle Steel chose to write about a Japanese girl. She gives her story an interesting setting: Delicate, waiflike, DS character comes to the States from Japan to live with her Very American cousins. Culture shock is experienced on both ends, but she adjusts well (because she is a DS character - no flaws allowed!). Of course, there is romance - with a white boy, no less! - and then there's that pesky war. After the Day That Will Live in Infamy, the girl and her family are placed in an internment camp where romance proves more difficult and the family reacts in various stereotypes to the war and their current situation.I'm not a huge advocate for "Write what you know from your own personal experience and nothing else," but in so many ways, this book reminded me of something an eighth grader would have written for a history class assignment: "Write a story about the Japanese in America in WWII." In many respects, "Silent Honor" features some interesting tidbits about Japanese culture and history (but I'd check them against an encyclopedia before I went around touting them as facts) and gives the reader a good flavor of the times, but it flaunts its research a little too much while still remaining offensively distant from the topic, and in the end, this proves slightly more irritating than the story is entertaining. Not quite only for Danielle Diehards, but only after the casual fan has read the earlier stuff.
Rating:
Summary: Not bad...but not good, either.
Review: After exhausting all the European countries for characters and storylines, Danielle Steel chose to write about a Japanese girl. She gives her story an interesting setting: Delicate, waiflike, DS character comes to the States from Japan to live with her Very American cousins. Culture shock is experienced on both ends, but she adjusts well (because she is a DS character - no flaws allowed!). Of course, there is romance - with a white boy, no less! - and then there's that pesky war. After the Day That Will Live in Infamy, the girl and her family are placed in an internment camp where romance proves more difficult and the family reacts in various stereotypes to the war and their current situation. I'm not a huge advocate for "Write what you know from your own personal experience and nothing else," but in so many ways, this book reminded me of something an eighth grader would have written for a history class assignment: "Write a story about the Japanese in America in WWII." In many respects, "Silent Honor" features some interesting tidbits about Japanese culture and history (but I'd check them against an encyclopedia before I went around touting them as facts) and gives the reader a good flavor of the times, but it flaunts its research a little too much while still remaining offensively distant from the topic, and in the end, this proves slightly more irritating than the story is entertaining. Not quite only for Danielle Diehards, but only after the casual fan has read the earlier stuff.
Rating: 
Summary: The first English-language book I've ever been dissapointed
Review: I didn't know anything about the author when I was tempted to purchase this book. I just thought that this novel would be a good example of Americans' perspective towards Japan, which is always good to know. Although this book once was (and still is?) one of the bestsellers in the US, and the book's universal message regarding peace and love was good to read, this was the first English book that I have ever got so disappointed. To me Japanese, situations and Japanese characters felt too unnatural. On the one hand the Japanese characters were depicted so overly "Japanese" that they often bowed just unnecessarily, and on the other hand their attitudes and behaviors were unbelievably so westernized. The real Japanese living in Japan almost in their lifetime could not easily act like that simply as a result of staying in the US for just a couple of months. I know I myself is a good example. I stayed in the US for 6 months before. I wish I could evaluate this novel as a nice try. A plethora of "tiny" failures just disabled me to do so.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting story
Review: I liked this book because I found it very interesting. I was able to read about a culture that I didn't know, and get a better understanding. It was a sad, horrible time for Japanese Americans, something that I think many of us forget- this story makes us remember.
Rating: 
Summary: CHALLENGES
Review: In Silent Honor by Danielle Steel, Hiroko, a shy and quite girl, goes to United States for a year. Hiroko also faces many problems, such us having to adjust to different traditions. She though she had nobody left but a knick on the door changed everything.
I though that this book was a very good one. It showed me how much people from different places have to face mean people. How much people suffer, and how love, family and good friends are important. Silent Honor has many examples of these things. Danielle Steel has a nice way to hold the reader, you even get has at times and feel sorry for Hiroko.
Rating:
Summary: 20 Stars if I could!!!
Review: Silent Honor *****
Oh, my. Where do I begin? First of all, I thank DS for wring it, because if it wasn't for her, I would have never found an intrest toward our World Wars I/II or a softnes to Japanese people, their language or their culture.
I'd give this book 20 stars and counting. Highly recomended.
Rating:
Summary: A Great Short Read!
Review: This book is absolutely beautiful. There is so much in it that we can learn, I just don't know how to put it into words. I just barely finished it and I loved it. Good insights into Pearl Harbor and what the Japanese citizens/immigrants went through.
Rating:
Summary: Silent Honor
Review: This is a moving story about the unbelievable pain and prejudice faced by the Japanese in America during WWII. It tells about the life experiences of Hiroko, a Japanese girl, who arrives in America right after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. It tells of her life detained in an internment camp and her life after she is released. It tells of her romance and losses. The story is fictional, but could be real... The historical backdrop is convincing and very realistic. It reveals many of the injustices imposed on the Japanese during this time. A powerful and thought-provoking novel.
Rating:
Summary: Important story, horrible writing
Review: This is the story of one of the most shameful times in American history, the internment of the Japanese Americans. As a half-Japanese, I know I would have been rounded up during this time and stripped of my Constitutional rights, treated as a prisoner. As such, I try to read whatever I can about this important part of America's story. "Silent Honor" is hardly the most "distinguished" or important books available on the subject. It tells the story of a Japanese girl, visiting her cousins (who, as Steel goes to great lengths to remind us, again and again, are AMERICAN, so much that they giggle at her traditions that they don't understand) in California during the time of Pearl Harbor. She gets stuck there and is placed in an internment camp. Along the way, she meets an amazing American man and has an affair with him. If you can disregard the affair (which you should cause it's pretty ludicrous, but I guess standard for this kind of book), you might get a lot out of this novel. The depictions of camp life and the hell that the internees faced is pretty well done. Steel does her research and tries to incorporate important Japanese mores such as "shikata-ga-nai" and historical details like the "no-no-boys" in to her story. You will learn a lot about the camps. I enjoyed the characters and the attention to historical detail, but it must be said that Steel is a pretty horrible writer. She begins almost every sentence with "And...". I think it's trying to sound dramatic, but mostly it sounds like she needs an editor. If you've never read Steel before, this might drive you insane (look past it, if you can). If you are a big fan, I think this (along with Wanderlust) is probably her best work.
Rating: 
Summary: sack those research assistants Danielle
Review: This novel is so wrong it is actually funny.
The cover design alone should be enough of a warning that this book is wide of the mark, it's red and gold, which are popular in the Chinese palette, but not Japan.
I bought this book for my Japanese wife and from the very first sentence she started giggling at the ridiculous errors.
The first character introduced in the novel has the alleged family name of Takashimaya.
Takashimaya is not a family name in Japan, but it is the name of a very well known upscale department store chain.
(The suffix ya means shop, btw).
Maybe the Japanese translation of this novel has a lead character named Mister Nieman Marcus? I could go on but I am laughing too much to type properly.
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