Publishers Weekly (Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)

PW's starred review noted the """"haunting immediacy"""" of this tale set in a Japanese American internment camp during WW II, adding that the """"hushed, realistic paintings add to the poignancy of [the] narrative."""" Ages 5-up. (Nov.)

Horn Book (Thu Apr 01 00:00:00 CST 1993)

During World War II, when Emi and her family are imprisoned in an internment camp for Japanese Americans, the young girl discovers that, although so much has been taken away from her, she will never lose the memories of friends and home that she carries in her heart. Realistic watercolors illustrate the affecting story, and an afterword comments on the abrogation of Japanese Americans' civil rights that took place in 1942.

ALA Booklist (Wed Sep 01 00:00:00 CDT 1993)

Like many other books by Uchida, this picture book story is based on her own experience as a Japanese American interned in a prison camp during World War II. A brief afterword summarizes the general facts and figures of the injustice and the recent restitution, but the story and pictures are about one child, Emi, and her bewilderment and sadness: leaving her empty house, saying goodbye to her best friend, traveling with her mother and older sister to the abandoned Tanforan Racetracks, and trying to make a home in a dark, dirty horse stall. Before Emi leaves Berkeley, her best friend gives her a bracelet. Emi's heartbroken when she loses the gift in the camp, but she comes to realize that she doesn't need a bracelet to remember what she loved and left behind. The bracelet becomes a metaphor for the gift of friendship, the loss, and the enduring bond. Yardley's watercolor paintings show the long lines of people and the barbed wire and also the heartfelt emotion, as when Emi hugs her friend goodbye. Rooted as this story is, it is about the wartime refugee experience everywhere, and kids will identify with the injustice that could suddenly invade an ordinary home right here on their street. (Reviewed Sept. 15, 1993)

Kirkus Reviews

Emi, a young Japanese-American whose family leaves Berkeley to be interned at the beginning of WW II, receives a bracelet as a parting gift from her best friend, but it's lost on the first day at the camp. Emi is desolate, but soon realizes she won't need a keepsake to remember her friend—the memories that fill her heart will always be with her. This account of injustice and dislocation- -based on the author's own experiences and previously published as a short story—achieves its wrenching effect by the accumulation of details: a beloved garden left untended, matching registration tags attached to family members and their belongings, the squalid ``apartment'' in a horse stall at an abandoned racetrack. Readers can find the autobiographical roots of this story in The Invisible Thread (1991), along with many other examples of the courage and determination that enabled Uchida's family, like Emi's, to survive imprisonment with values and spirit intact. The carefully researched watercolors, with their irregular edges, are like old pictures ripped from an album. (Picture book. 6-9)"

School Library Journal

Gr 2-5-It is 1942, and seven-year-old Emi is being sent from her home in Berkeley, California, to an internment camp with her mother and older sister. Her father was arrested earlier and incarcerated in a camp in Montana. Temporarily herded into stables at a race track with other Japanese-American families, Emi realizes that she has lost the bracelet that her best friend, Laurie Madison, gave her as a parting keepsake. At first desolate, she soon realizes that she does not need the token after all, as she will always carry Laurie in her heart and mind. Uchida employs a simple, descriptive style, allowing the child's feelings to give punch to this vignette without becoming sentimental. An afterword gives brief, dignified historical context to the story. Yardley's watercolor illustrations both match and amplify the text at every point, evincing the greatest sensitivity to the depiction of character and to historical accuracy. This deceptively simple picture book will find a ready readership and prove indispensable for introducing this dark episode in American history.-John Philbrook, San Francisco Public Library