| Title | : | Farewell to Manzanar: A True Story of Japanese American Experience During and After the World War II Internment |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0553272586 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780553272581 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 203 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1973 |
Farewell to Manzanar is the true story of one spirited Japanese-American family's attempt to survive the indignities of forced detention—and of a native-born American child who discovered what it was like to grow up behind barbed wire in the United States.
Farewell to Manzanar: A True Story of Japanese American Experience During and After the World War II Internment Reviews
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The scene where Jeanne's mother throws her china dishes onto the floor - one by one - in front of a salesman who wants to buy them for an offensively low price, just because he knows she has no choice -is one of the best moments of triumph of the human spirit over injustice that I have ever read. I will never forget it.
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several years ago i took a postwar japan course that assigned this memoir, but it was dropped off the syllabus at the end of the year and i didn't take the time to revisit it. i wish i had sooner, because it's an important story, especially within the context of the many cultural shifts of the WWII era.
jeanne wakatsuki was one of thousands of japanese americans sent to internment camps during WWII, and she resided there during a significant chunk of her childhood. her story is told through the eyes of a child who cannot fully understand all that she's enduring; not only the shoddy living conditions and the concept of being restricted to internment, but witnessing the endless struggles of her family.
jeanne's anguished father is intense. he suffers miserably, escapes with the numbing of alcoholism, abuses jeanne's mother, and remains caught between his loyalty to japan and his loyalty to the US. he is plaintively attached to japan despite knowing that he will never go back.
shikata ga nai is a japanese phrase that echoes throughout the WWII era. it means nothing can be done about it, there is no way, it cannot be helped; and this is a typical attitude about interment. for jeanne's family and many others, cooperation becomes survival.
one particularly heartbreaking thing is that when the war ends, many japanese americans are reluctant to leave internment. moving from familiar imprisonment to an unfamiliar cultural climate of racism is a terrifying prospect.
Call it the foretaste of being hated. I knew ahead of time that if someone looked at me with hate, I would have to allow it, to swallow it, because something in me, something about me deserved it. At ten I saw that coming, like a judge's sentence, and I would have stayed inside the camp forever rather than step outside and face such a moment.
the book itself is both emotional and extremely educational. it's well-organized, with a timeline of events and a Q&A with the author! definitely recommended. -
I owe Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston my career.
Re-reading this as research for my writing.
It was while reading this book during my "Narratives of Interment" course in college that one of my classmates asked the fateful question, "Can we go to California?" "We'll see," our professor replied. He shocked us all a few days later by explaining that the American Studies department would foot the bill for our class to go to Manzanar. We were ecstatic. It was the most moving experience I have ever had. It was totally worth the red eye flight and sleepless night on our return trip, even before we boarded the bus to the camp, for we were going on the annual pilgrimage to Manzanar with former internees. It was very emotional to realise that had I been born 50 years earlier on the west coast, I would have been in camp too. And it was really strange to see everyone treating it like a huge family reunion.
12 years later, after grad school - at a professor's advice - I returned for the 50th pilgrimage, because they had revamped the site. I was delighted to see that disability education was included and that started me down my second research on Japanese American disability history, which I am pioneering, as no one's done much with it yet. -
Reviewed by Taylor Rector for TeensReadToo.com
FAREWELL TO MANZANAR is the chilling autobiography of a Japanese-American girl who survived the interment camps during World War II.
When I began reading this book I had no idea what the "internment" camps were. This is a subject that not many know about and is not a very well-known time in history. "Internment" camps were camps that the American government put together after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor to house all of the Japanese-Americans who lived on the west coast. The people were forced to go and didn't have a choice, even if they were born in America and only had Japanese ancestry. The camps were in the middle of the desert, so that the people wouldn't be able to leave.
At first I didn't like the book very much. But as I kept reading I began to like it. I can't say that I loved it, because I didn't; it's not a "loving" type of story. I enjoyed learning about something that I knew nothing about.
I think all Americans should read this book so that they know that this happened. It is not something that is often talked about, but it should be, so that every American citizen knows about this part that the government played in World War II. -
Reading as an adult, I think I enjoyed the book much more at the beginning. Initially, the story is intriguing, specific, and personal, setting the reader in the moment. It's strength is that it tells a particular and true tale of the Japanese Internment that is not just a story that happens during the time period, but a personal experience and the connections to events before and after the years in Manzanar. Compared to the horrible stories of human atrocities heard from other parts of the world, Jeanne's trials are comparatively not so bad although she does attempt to explain why they affected other members of her family more by assaulting her father's honor and her mother's dignity and the social institution of family. However, in order to keep the book short, the experiences seem to become further apart and less well connected more into the book. While it is a nice memoir, and certainly appropriate for kids, this is not a kid's book despite being about a child. It evolves into much more of a nostalgic look into childhood from an adult perspective and the effects of such a childhood on an adult. I think that the overall piece would have been much stronger had it settled on one particular idea such as dissolving family conditions or dealing with racial shame. Instead, the book does what it attempted to do, help an adult deal with childhood memories while providing a historical document for family members. I would likely recommend other books on the Japanese Internment to children instead of this one.
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Although I've read a lot of stories written by Holocaust survivors, this was the first book that I have read about the Japanese-American internment camps. This is a part of American history that many, many Americans seem to know nothing about.
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Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston really breathes life into history with this book which tells the real-life story of her internment in a relocation camp during World War 2.
It is no secret that the USA is a racist country and always has been. Asians met with the same hateful behavior that Native Americans, blacks, etc have faced. I was glad to see the point made in the book by a person who sued the US government for being imprisoned during the war without having committed any crime nor undergone due process or court trial that both Germany and Italy were our enemies during the war yet there was no interment camps for German-Americans nor Italian-Americans (maybe they were too white?) . This is something my own father used to rant about when I was a child. He had been drafted as a young man into the war and sent to the Pacific where he nearly fell victim to Japanese kamikaze pilots and was at one time a prisoner of war of the Japanese and brutally tortured and abused yet remained refreshingly non-racist and spoke out against the internment as being racist and against our murdering and injuring Japanese housewives, babies, toddlers, grandmas, school kids, nurses, etc at Hiroshima and Nagasaki when the Japanese had attacked a military installation and we brutally and viciously acted like barbarians and murdered innocent civilians on purpose.
Jeanne and thousands of other Japanese-Americans, almost all who had been born in the USA and who mostly had never even been to Japan were essentially rounded up like the Nazis rounded up the Jews, based on being of Japanese heritage. They were herded into desert areas into squalid conditions that would cause a landlord to be deemed a slum lord and held prisoner for years with no charges of any crime leveled against them and no recourse. They lost their homes, businesses, and everything they owned.
Jeanne's story is about one family, her family, and what happened to them. I am richer emotionally from having read her story. This book reads like a conversation between friends. It was like she was talking directly to me. Even after they were freed (many just tossed out of the camps after the war with no where to go and everything lost) , it was as if there was still barbed wire between them and the rest of society as racism took the place of the barbed wire as a very real barrier they had to overcome. -
There's a lot of baggage associated with this title -- It pops up frequently on required reading lists for schools. Oh, the irony of being forced to read a book about people being forced against their wills. Also, the work was one of the first published narratives documenting the internment experience, and the author's intended audience, as she explains in the afterword, was not specifically for young readers (although, of course, she welcomes its popularity in classroom curriculum). I don't like the historical tendency in publishing to attach a "young reader" label to a work, simply because the narrator is a young person. That seems to be changing in the last few years, but when this work first hit the scene in the early 70's, it was instantly labeled a work for youth, and therefore missed an audience, for decades, and maybe still, that should have been familiar with it, especially since there remains a relative lack of Japanese-American internment narratives in print. The fist half of the work is an easily accessible description of life before and during the internment; but the second half is a mediation on the effects of the experience on the rest of her life, a pilgrimage to the desolate geography of the camp, and a reckoning with her father's memory. Young readers required to read this for a class are likely to lose interest at this point, and the adult readers who might find this narrative rewarding might never discover it as material appropriate for their demographic. The empathic turn has been too sharp for most readers, and requires a really deft teacher to pull them through. Parallels to current racist tendencies, as the author relates her narrative to 9/11, might be good opportunities to ease readers through the turn.
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I was incensed at the government for the first time in my life after reading this at age 11. That was the first time I looked at the myths of our country critically. I think it's sad that they only way children learn about the Japanese internment situation is through reading outside of school.
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3.75 stars
This is the memoir of a woman who lived in a Japanese internment camp when she was very young (age 7-11). While the internment is a key part of the book, it’s also about family and how events like this shaped them for years to come.
It’s not very long and feels like it was written for a younger audience, though Jeanne says her goal was just to make it accessible to many ages. It’s kind of hard to rate.
I have family in Tulelake on the Oregon-California border. I was much older before I knew there had been an internment camp there, and I went and saw it a few years ago. Not much is left. Part of me can’t believe something like that could happen — Asians weren’t even allowed to become citizens until the 1950s — yet every once in a while I see on social media calls to round up “those people,” usually referring to people with different opinions.
This should probably be required reading for junior high; it often is.
Book Blog -
A well-written, expansive, yet personal account of internment camps during WWII. Houston was 7 when her family was interned, and collects her memories alongside those of her family members in Farewell to Manzanar. The effect of the internment on the Wakatsuki family was excruciating to read, but graciously written. She also speaks more about life after the camp, and her experiences in high school were heartbreaking. Recommended reading on internment camps for middle school readers and above.
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I saw this movie way back in junior high, but I couldn't remember having read the book.
A straightforward, easy to read, first-person account of something that never should have happened here in America. The author was only seven years old at the time her family went into the camp. It's interesting to read her views of the situation as a child, then later in the book to see her perspective looking back, when she realizes the long-term effects of that early experience. -
A good look at a part of American history that many Americans may not know about, the internment camps during World War II that housed Japanese Americans for about three years. This story tells about life in one of the camps, Manzanar, and how it affected the author and her family. It also tells about the after effects that staying at the camp had on the author long after she left. Highly recommend 👍
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The author's memoirs of her coming of age years, centered around time spent with her family in a WWII Internment Camp. I read this along with my daughter's 8th grade English class and learned a lot about this regrettable period of American history. The book is written to be accessible for a YA audience while also remaining interesting to adult readers.
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One of the many atrocities committed by the U.S. Government was the forced relocation and incarceration in camps in the interior of the country of between 110,000 and 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry who lived on the Pacific coast. Sixty-two percent of the internees were United States citizens. These actions were ordered by President Franklin D. Roosevelt shortly after Imperial Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. Many consider the internment to have resulted more from racism than from any security risk posed by Japanese Americans. Hopefully, this will never happen in our country again but the current atmosphere regarding Muslims and terrorism may prove that things haven't changed.
Farewell to Manzanar tells the story of the Wakatsuki family before, during, and after their forced internment at Manzanar located in Owens Valley at the foot of the Sierra mountains in California. The story is narrated by Jeanne, the youngest Wakatsuki member who at age 7 was moved along with her family from their life in San Pedro California where her father, Ko, was a successful fisherman. Ko was arrested as a collaborator and sent to a camp in North Dakota while the rest of the family was sent to Manzanar. They could only take what they could carry and many possessions had to be left behind. Rather than sell her expensive china set to a salesman at a ridiculously low price because she has no choice, Jeanne's mother smashes her dishes onto the floor in front of him...one of the best scenes in the story!
Jeanne tells how her life really began at Manzanar which left her self-conscious about her race and identity for the rest of her life. The book details the poor conditions they faced when they arrived and how they eventually made Manzanar their home. At the end, they were reluctant to leave because of the fear of being outcasts in post-war society. Overall, a very effective and touching memoir that I would recommend. -
Also see my thoughts in this BookTube video
https://youtu.be/mQg1U7pOca0
3.5 STARS
I read this book shortly after reading When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka. That book gave me all the FEELS and I gave it 4 stars. I really enjoyed this book, but I could not give it 4 stars because it did not provoke my emotions like the previous book. However, this book did give a lot of facts from history. I liked the timeline given at the front of the book. I also liked the fact the author explained a lot of the laws surrounding the internment camps. This story also goes into how Jeanne's life was affected after leaving the camp which was very interesting.
I STILL HIGHLY RECOMMEND THIS BOOK. I absolutely enjoyed reading a first hand account of this experience. I also love learning about points in U.S. history that are neglected because they don't fit into the pretty picture that many like to believe about its history. -
An incredible book that taught me a lot about the Manzanar internment camp, which I wasn't very familiar with. It explores the effect of this on Jeanne and her family during this time, and also after. It's quick, easy to follow and well worth the read.
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Read and listened with the kids this time. Hard to believe this really happened in our country. So glad the author wrote down her experiences for us all to know.
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May 2021 I lost this review a few years back. Am reading Facing the Mountain a new book about the discrimination to Japanese Americans after the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japan. Was thinking about this book. And wanted to read my review. There wasn’t one so decided to write one instead.
After re-reading this important book when I moved to CA I went to visit Manzanar. It’s not too far from Yosemite National Park. It’s located on the backside of the Sierra’s called the Sierra Nevada. There is a museum south of that where they had photographs Ansel Adams took of of the residents and some of the living areas and other buildings. I spent time with each person’s pic. it was a way of honoring each person and what they went through. Having faces made the events and what happened more real to me. Walking the grounds of Manzanar and going into the families living areas and feeling the winds and all that open space I felt the book come alive. And there were the mountains that one looked out at. It made me very angry and compassionate both that peoples lives were destroyed and shamed by acts of discrimination. I was so moved by all the things the group did to make it a home best they could. The rocks were still there from the Japanese garden. The baseball diamond was still there and I could see in my mind’s eye the games played there as described in the book and saw the veggie garden area come alive too. The dances that they had touched me too as I read about them. The schools they created for the kids touched me more deeply being there. They created so many things to create a life worth living for the children and place to live more humanly within the limitations that were there. As Jean described it - Manzanar was a place of child’s laughter too.
The park area when I went in 1995 was weathered. They hadn’t done much to it after the residents were set free. Most didn’t have a home to go back to. Free to do what?!? Most of their material assets and personal things were gone.
An elderJapanese friend of mine took her grand kids there on a trip on her 70th birthday. She had never talked about her experience there as a youth with them before. She shared some of her stories with them and answered their questions. She felt it was important for them to know about this time in America.
A neighbor’s acre was saved by their neighbors back then. They had a home to return to. And they’ve created a lush land of fruit trees and veggie gardens and green houses and flowers. This simple way of living and touching the earth brings them the most joy as they lived the elder part of their lives.
A lot has been written in the last few years about the Japanese experience after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and time in interment camps. Farewell to Manzanar was the first book that offered me understanding of what Japanese American people went through during WWII and the day by day living there. I didn’t hear much about it growing up in New England. Through this book I learned how the acts of J Edgar Hoover and FDR and others caused such cruelty to people who were citizens and/or long term residents of our country. America was their home; It was 70 years ago the bombing of Pearl Harbor took place and soon after people were moved to the internment camps. Writing the wrongs of history and ending discriminatory acts is still unfolding (as is righting the wrongs) -
I’m embarrassed to have gone so long without reading this, but I’m glad I didn’t let that stop me.
For all I’ve heard about this book over the years, especially in regards to how groundbreaking it (and its film adaptation) was, I was surprised at first that it was so...quiet. By the end, however, that quietness had become a strength, especially for a book often read by teens who are maybe first learning about the mass incarceration. Rather than being an angry book with a very strong agenda (which for sure can be used to good effect, and which this book has every right to be), it is instead sad yet optimistic, and the focus on the mundanity of everyday life is the perfect key into the garden of literature that has grown as more former inmates have shared their experiences. The child’s perspective is relatable in a way that I hope would speak to anyone who’s been a child, and while the author’s story is uniquely her own, it’s also the voice for so many others. I’ve heard it took some convincing for the author to share and then publish her story, and we’re incredibly lucky she did. -
This book really changed my life as a youth. My parents both encouraged me to read it. Specifically my mother who is not that Japanese side of my heritage. My great grandparents on my father's side were originally from Japan. My grandfather who was full blooded first generation American fought in WWII. My great uncle however did not and was with his family put into a Japanese internment camp. It gave me a view into what my family went through. Brothers divided on the idea of the war and the suspicion that my family had to endure simply for the fact that their parents were from Japan. It is something that is not exactly spoken about in my family, I only have little bits and pieces to go off of but this book opened my eyes to what life might of been like for my great uncle and his family. I really should re-read it now that I'm older.
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"I smiled and sat down, suddenly aware of what being of Japanese ancestry was going to be like. I wouldn't be faced with physical attack, or with overt shows of hatred. Rather, I would be seen as someone foreign, or as someone other than American, or perhaps not be seen at all."
I knew quite a bit about the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII going into this book, but this was a really important and honest look into what everyday life was like for the internees. I would definitely encourage more people to read this! -
This is the tragic story about how the US government treated its own citizens in WWII. Thousands of Japanese American people, many of whom were born in this country, were placed in internment camps to "protect" the American people. Is this hindsight or were people actually deluded into believing the Japanese Americans were a threat? Judge for your own opinion on this controversial topic.
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In San Antonio, Texas, an abandoned quarry donated to the city in 1899 was turned into a lily pond garden and tourist attraction during the early 1900s, eventually becoming known as the "Japanese Tea Garden" and featuring a tea room. Visitors today are greeted by a magnificently carved elaborate wooden archway at the park entrance that reads "Chinese Tea Garden."
One story circulating to explain this discrepancy is that the Japanese-American tea room operators had this arch carved at considerable expense in an attempt to pass themselves off as Chinese, thereby avoiding discrimination and internment in the wake of Pearl Harbor. After all, they supposedly reasoned, their neighbors probably couldn't tell the difference.
This story is not true. According to
official sources, the Jingu family was evicted in 1942 due to anti-Japanese sentiment and a Chinese-American family was hired to rebrand the park and take over operation of the tea room, which they did up through the 1960s. Their work included installing the arch.
But although that first explanation for the arch isn't true, it feels plausible, and it's certainly more memorable than the truth. The tactic described in the story cleverly exploits the harsh indifference of racism and seeks to turn it against itself. It never happened, but it seems like the kind of thing that might have been tried.
By Houston's account, American internment camps for families bore little resemblance to their Nazi counterparts in Europe (what the camps for men suspected of anti-American activities were like, she never saw - only their effect on her father). Yet it was clear even to her child's awareness that isolating and containing possible Japanese agents and sympathizers was only a pretext. Spies and saboteurs are of course a concern in wartime, but this was no counter-intelligence campaign. It seems likely that decades of systemic discrimination against Asian immigrants and Asian-Americans made genuine counter-intelligence either impractical or unthinkable.
Houston survived internment, apparently with minimal trauma relative to other and older detainees. She grew up, made herself a way forward, and went to college, where she studied journalism and sociology. Both serve her exceptionally well in writing Farewell to Manzanar. Houston blends a journalist's dispassionate reporting of the facts through personal narrative with a sociologist's insight into group dynamics, incorporating concepts into her 1970s memoir that wouldn't be mainstreamed for another 40 years. An impressive and important work, detailing a shameful chapter of American history that all Americans should be familiar with. -
Reading about the WW II internment camps for American citizens from a child’s point of view maybe and probably is a simplified example of what actually happened and how it harmed the lives of those involved. But Ms. Wakatsuki did a great job. The story is well written and informative, an easy recommendation.
This is a subject that has intrigued me since elementary school. Too young to be overly prejudiced I found it incredible that the government could imprison its citizens. Lesson learned? Government is not always good or benevolent, but is a power that can do both good and also cause great harm. I’ve never been trustful since. -
These rock gardens had outlived the barracks and the towers and would surely outlive the asphalt road and rusted pipes and shattered slabs of concrete. Each stone was a mouth, speaking for a family, for some man who had beautified his doorstep.
Illuminating. -
I ready this novel in high school. I was horrified that we had treated our Japanese citizens so badly. It is one of those stories that stays with you… for decades!
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So you got Jeanne, a very young girl who is thrown into a world full of confusion, racism, and prejudice, all of which she does not understand right away.
On the other hand, you got her father who drinks a lot and expresses his hatred toward their situation as well as his disagreements on the way Japanese people have been treated. He is very traditional. believing in honor, courage, and respect, a ways of life which have not only been challenged but also are slowly disappearing from his children, making him highly unstable and about to go off on a verbal rampage at any mention of his children trying to assimilate to the US culture.
This was evident few times throughout the book, but mostly during the time when Jeanne mentioned she wanted to join a Catholic church, as well as when she mentioned she wanted to be a sort of a prom queen at her school, an honor unheard off during this time among the Oriental people.
Her father drank a lot and her mother, while a rather timid person in nature just sat back and tried to avid physical violence that could be inflicted on her by her a violent drunk of a husband. This also scared all the children to a point where they hid in their room and hoped for the best. She was a more of a calm and rational person who wanted her children to be something and enjoy life as much as possible.
Besides her family, you got Jeanne, a naive little girl who does not seem to fit anywhere due to her background. At school she does not seem to fit anywhere and at home she gets discriminated against due to her Oriental background. Once she went to a real school the first question her classmates asked her was , "you can speak English?". In a way this was very similar to my upbringing when the kids not only asked me whether I can speak English but also tried to get me in trouble by teaching me to say "fuck", "shit" and plenty of other forbidden obscenities.
Anyway, I am totally shitfaced (out partying too long) right now but this book was overall a rather dull attempt to portray a life of struggle and a need to fit and feel accepted. During many times I felt sorry for this girl and her family (as well as others around her) because she is not only pushed away but she is also prevented from enjoying life as a young girl should be able to do. This is coming from me, a person who was thrown into a school full of strangers who spoke a language that could not be more foreign to me. Trust me, I know all about this but on a smaller level. Jeanne experienced a hatred far harsher than me but the important thing is that she manged to overcome it, even if it always stayed with her as a reminder of hatred projected from one race to another. Even at the end she had a nerve needle in her mind that was a reminder that life can change in second, for better or worse. -
Revisit: 2023
I read this book first in high school, then college- I dismissed this as an overly simplistic memoir that did not go deep into insight about what it felt being forced to leave home and to live in an internment camp. I called it dull and somewhat outdated. However...once again, writing in the lens of a teacher who wants to be an advocate for his students, this time, with a closer reading, it's a coming of age masterpiece of resilience in spite of being deemed the other.
Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's memoir of the travails of being a Japanese prisoner of war at the Manzanar camps have moments that are harrowing and exemplifies the triumph of the human spirit, and the will to survive hardships and systemic oppression. Kids will probably relate to the coming of age aspect of this memoir especially with Jeanne and her brother Woody’s desire to be themselves among strict and foreign parents who have been used to their own traditions.
My only beef with this memoir is that Ms Houston compares to some of her hardships with that of the black experience and their history of slavery. I found these small passages to be somewhat of a stretch. But I also understand when one is experiencing trauma, and they're marginalized as a teenager, this point of view may very well have been Wakatsuki's truth of the moment. In her teenage context, Jim Crow was still alive and well in America, and the struggles of the black community were the only ones she probably could viscerally relate to. I am speculating, but I saw it as this. But Wakatsuki writes with nuance: shades of what it’s like being a teenager, the hormones, loneliness, desire to be a typical American. At times the yearning is heartbreaking.
However, it’s still an effective piece of non fiction that will probably enthrall young readers and allow themselves to think about how lucky they are that they were not forcibly removed from their homes and relocated to Internment camps. It is a good memoir to teach juxtaposed with coming of age memoirs concerning genocide and resilience such as Night, The Children of Willesden Lane, Maus, Born a Crime, A Long Way Gone, and When I Was Puerto Rican.
