When the Emperor was Devine

My first reaction about this book is about the detail the author has put into her work. My mind is overwhelmed with images of what this family has gone through in the first two chapters of this book. The daughter sticks out as the most memorable character. The uncertainty she is facing for such a young girl i find does not normally find girls until their teenage years and if i remember correctly she is around 10 years old. She questions her importance and her beauty as well as the quality of the things she has such as the scarf to identify what seems to be her worth. She sees herself as a, “Plain girl in a plain blue scarf”, when she looks into the mirror in the bathroom on the train. She is confident in her mother’s beauty and wants to look very much like her mother because everyone else agrees with her beauty like Ted, whom she meets in the line for the bathroom on the train. After telling Ted about the scarf she was wearing she went back to her seat and asked her brother, “Is this not the most beautiful scarf you have ever seen?” he replied that she had worn a prettier one the year before lowering her self esteem even more. She struggles with finding something special about herself and we see when she is drawing with her brother that she does have talent however she fails to remember that talent because she is consumed with her looks. The fact that he father brought her back two of the same scarves makes her feel less important because she asked for perfume from his trip to Paris. When going through the deck of cards she threw them all out the window and when holding the last one in her hand exclaimed, “There was nothing special about this card, the six of clubs” this is the card she writes her name on before throwing it too out the window. This action shows the reader that she relates herself to this card of no importance.  It is hard for her to get a grasp on who she is and the talents she has when “Everything keeps on changing “ and she has no control over any of it.