Kirkus Reviews

Political history becomes personal narrative in this evocative story about a family's connection to Manzanar, one of the WW II camps where Japanese-Americans were interned. Prior to moving from California to Boston, the Iwasakis pay a last visit to the grave of Grandfather Iwasaki. Gazing across acres of empty space that once housed close to 10,000 prisoners, Mr. and Mrs. Iwasaki share vivid memories of camp life with their two young children, Thomas and Laura. As they struggle to explain the unfair treatment accorded her ancestors, Laura listens quietly, then, just before leaving, places one final memento on her grandfather's grave. Bunting's spare prose effectively matches the developmental level of the ages for which this book is geared, and will generate questions that both educators and parents will find difficult to answer. Stark watercolors of the present alternate with black-and-white drawings representing scenes from the past. Together, text and illustrations create and sustain a mood of reflection and reminiscence suited to the topic. (Picture book. 5-9)

Horn Book (Sat Aug 01 00:00:00 CDT 1998)

Visiting the site of the Manzanar War Relocation Camp with her family in 1972, young Laura's anger about her father and grandparents' internment experience is juxtaposed with her father's desire to forget the past and move on. Portraying a rarely seen point of view, the book provides room for discussion of changing historiographical and cultural expectations. Realistic watercolors present flashback scenes in black and white.

ALA Booklist (Fri May 01 00:00:00 CDT 1998)

A young Japanese American girl tells how she and her family visit the site at Manzanar, where her father was interned as a child in 1942 and where her grandfather died, heartbroken. Soentpiet's vivid watercolors show the sorrow of the family in the empty winter landscape. As they walk through the camp site in the icy wind to the cemetery and the monument, her father remembers how it was for him there at her age. The illustrations of wartime are in sepia shades, like black-and-white newsreel photographs: first, scenes of the camp with people behind barbed wire, guard towers with searchlights, her father with other children in a crowded schoolroom; then back to how they got there, the roundups and the anguished scenes when soldiers came into the house and took the family away. Adults will need to explain the historical settings to kids; that is, the story is set in 1972 and the memories are of 1942. There is much to talk about. The father tells of the attack on Pearl Harbor and talks therapeutically ("Sometimes in the end there is no right or wrong. . . . We have to put it behind us and move on"). But the sadness endures, and the questions: these were proud Americans, how could it happen to them? Connect this with the books in the Read-alikes column on the opposite page. (Reviewed May 1, 1998)

School Library Journal

Gr 2-5--All the more moving in its restraint, this picture-book account of a fictional family reveals, with gentle dignity, a sad chapter in American history. Laura Iwasaki and her Japanese-American family will soon move from California to Boston, so they are making one last visit to Laura's grandfather's grave, which lies near the Sierra Nevada Mountains, so far from the sea he loved. Before World War II, he was a fisherman. Then, along with Laura's father, her grandmother, and 10,000 other Japanese Americans, he was sent to the Manzanar War Relocation Center. There he died, and his grave is marked with only a ring of stones. The family leaves silk flowers, but Laura leaves her own special memento. Soentpiet's impressionistic watercolors perfectly complement Bunting's evocative text. Both create a palpable sense of Manzanar as it is today: a windy, isolated place, its buildings gone, dominated by snow-covered mountains. Black-and-white paintings that suggest `40s photographs illustrate Laura's father's memories of the camp. This book is much more personal than Sheila Hamanaka's nonfiction text for her mural, The Journey (Orchard, 1990), and more accessible. At the story's end, Laura whispers, "It was wrong." Her father answers, "Sometimes in the end there is no right or wrong....It is just a thing that happened long years ago. A thing that cannot be changed." Yet art and text invite a new generation of Americans to remember that things can go terribly wrong when fear and hysteria prevail.--Margaret A. Chang, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts