ALA Booklist

In varied arrangements of free verse, Mina Masako Tagawa describes her Japanese American family's deportation from Seattle and years in an Idaho relocation camp from 1941 to 1945. When the eighth-grader departs, her best friend Jamie gives her a necklace of a half heart, like one she wears. The broken heart is a symbol of Mina's broken life: her father jailed for more than a year, her grandfather leaving behind all but one of his beloved roses, and the burdens of her angry brother and careworn mother. At the camp's school, Mina struggles to reconcile what she recites in the Pledge of Allegiance with their incarceration. A caring teacher reads them "Hope' is the thing with feathers" (the text doesn't preserve Dickinson's punctuation and capitalization or credit the poet). There are occasional letters between Mina and Jamie, and, after his army enlistment, from Mina's brother, whose European tour includes the liberation of Dachau. Mina's voice is not entirely convincing and her story is generic rather than personal, but the accessible form makes this a useful addition to a middle-school collection.

Horn Book

In this WWII-set verse novel, Mina Tagawa and her family are sent to the Minidoka Relocation Center. Mina's beloved grandfather dies, and her brother Nick enlists and is sent to the European front. Interspersed throughout the main text are letters Mina writes to her (imprisoned) father, her best friend, and to Nick. Nagai's writing is spare and rhythmic--it's real poetry.

Kirkus Reviews

Crystal-clear prose poems paint a heart-rending picture of 13-year-old Mina Masako Tagawa's journey from Seattle to a Japanese-American internment camp during World War II. This vividly wrought story of displacement, told from Mina's first-person perspective, begins as it did for so many Japanese-Americans: with the bombs dropping on Pearl Harbor. The backlash of her Seattle community is instantaneous ("Jap, Jap, Jap, the word bounces / around the walls of the hall"), and Mina chronicles its effects on her family with a heavy heart. "I am an American, I scream / in my head, but my mouth is stuffed / with rocks; my body is a stone, like the statue / of a little Buddha Grandpa prays to." When Roosevelt decrees that West Coast Japanese-Americans are to be imprisoned in inland camps, the Tagawas board up their house, leaving the cat, Grandpa's roses and Mina's best friend behind. Following the Tagawas from Washington's Puyallup Assembly Center to Idaho's Minidoka Relocation Center (near the titular town of Eden), the narrative continues in poems and letters. In them, injustices such as endless camp lines sit alongside even larger ones, such as the government's asking interned young men, including Mina's brother, to fight for America. An engaging novel-in-poems that imagines one earnest, impassioned teenage girl's experience of the Japanese-American internment. (historical note) (Verse/historical fiction. 11-14)

School Library Journal

Gr 4-8 Mina is a typical Japanese American girl living in Seattle until December 1941, when her life is changed forever by the bombing of Pearl Harbor. From this point on, everything changes for the worst. People are racist toward her and her family, her father is arrested and carted away without cause, and her family is told to pack up their belongings and report to an "assembly center" to be moved away "for their own safety." This novel in verse follows Mina's trials as she is ripped away from her friends and the life she knew, and forced to live in demeaning conditions throughout the duration of World War II. Nagai does a wonderful job examining what it means to Mina and her family members to be American while not being treated as true citizens. The book explores the obstacles they are faced with as they try to build a life worth living in the internment camps. While Mina and her brother Nick are well-developed, her parents and grandfather would have benefitted from a more in-depth treatment. The poetry is sometimes clunky, and readers who are not familiar with novels in verse might find it cumbersome. The letters Mina writes, both to her best friend in Seattle and to her brother, offer interesting insight, although it is sometimes frustrating that the correspondence is not shown in its entirety. This novel fills gaps in many collections where newer tales of the Japanese internment are lacking, especially for this age range. Ellen Norton, White Oak Library District, Crest Hill, IL

Voice of Youth Advocates

Thirteen-year-old Mina Masako Tagawa is a Japanese-American girl living a happy life in Seattle with her mother, father, grandfather, and older brother, Nick, until that fateful day in December 1941. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Mina's father is imprisoned for no reason, and she is hurt and confused to see that Japanese Americans have become the enemy, spat upon and stung with taunts of "Jap." Their family is one of thousands forced to "evacuate," first to a temporary relocation center and then to an internment camp in Idaho, where living conditions are as bleak as the landscape: long lines, bugs, unappetizing food, and holes in the ground that serve as toilets. Each family member copes differently with imprisonment. Mina writes letters to her father and her best friend back home; her mother focuses on work; Nick's anger hangs above him like "dark clouds;" and her grandfather is determined to grow roses in the inhospitable climate. Eventually Mina's father rejoins them, a weary and changed man. The family's anguish grows when Nick decides to prove his patriotism by enlisting in the military.Although war, imprisonment, and loss weigh heavily on the Tagawa family during their three years of internment, like the roses the grandfather successfully tends, their story is one of hope and resilience. This poignant, first-person narrative written in verse moves quickly, employing simple language and strong imagery to illuminate a shadowed period in American history. Nagai deftly conveys Mina's struggle for identity and her conflicting emotions at the betrayal of her beloved country. This would be a solid addition to the WWII section of any school or classroom library.Cathy Fiebelkorn.