Maw Books:  Welcome Ken!  First, would you take just a moment to briefly introduce yourself?

Ken Mochizuki: I was born in Seattle, Wash. My parents were also born there. My grandparents were from Japan, immigrating to America around the beginning of the last century. I have never been to Japan (yet), and I don’t know the Japanese language, except for a few words more than most Americans know. My grandparents spoke only Japanese (except a grandmother did speak fairly fluent English – a rarity for that generation), and my parents spoke English since they were Americans born in this country. They only spoke in Japanese to their parents and only in English to us kids – except when they got mad at us. Then those Japanese words started slipping out.

I have been complimented on my ability to speak English, even though it is the only language I know. I have been asked, “Where are you from?” When I answer “Seattle,” I am then asked, “But where are you really from?” Total strangers who I have not antagonized in any way have yelled at me to “Go back to where you came from!”

The closest thing to a martial art I know is European foil fencing. I am not that short (5’8”). Math was always my worst subject in school – history/social studies, English/language arts were my best. I am not a computer nerd. I am not a slow and lousy driver of a car. When I go on vacation, I am not wearing five cameras around my neck and a video cam on my shoulder.

(Okay, that wasn’t very brief.)

Maw Books:  Brief or no, very interesting stuff!  I love the background  you’ve given us.  I remember when we were looking to purchase our new home, the owner told us that the neighbors were Vietnamese.  It wasn’t so much the fact that he mentioned it, but the way he said it.  As if it made a tangible difference to us.  Afterwards, I discussed this with my husband (who is half-Chinese with full Asian extended family) because it bothered me.  If the neighbors were white, I doubt they would have mentioned it.  Later, when my mother-in-law visited, she met these Vietnamese neighbors who asked where she was from.  “Hawaii” she responded.  “No, where are you really from?” they asked.  “Hawaii and my parents from Hawaii also.”  What it boiled down to is that they wanted to know where she was really from.  They weren’t satisfied until China was the answer.  That experience taught me that it doesn’t matter if it’s coming from those who are white, black, Asian, or Hispanic.  Everybody tends to want to know where people, particularly minorities, are “really” from.  So to boil this actually down to a question, most of your books are about the Asian American experience and countering the stereotypes that many people have about those from Asian descent.  How has your own family and personal history influenced you to tackle these subjects?

Ken Mochizuki: I can’t speak for my family, particularly my parents and their siblings, but they did experience the Japanese American incarceration during World War II and living in Seattle immediately after the war, so they must have experienced their share of the stereotypes and prejudice. As you can tell by my introduction, I have been the recipient of stereotypes about Asians most of my life, so that has had a major impact on the career paths that I have chosen and what I did within those careers. In the Hollywood entertainment industry and in acting, there was a constant battle with the stereotypes and I fought for the portrayals of Asians (especially Asian men) as more human. Same as a journalist – I fought for accurate portrayals and aspects of the Asian American experience that were not receiving coverage. So, the same now as a writer of books for young readers. My life’s work will probably involve making the American experiences of those of Asian descent known. This, of course, is especially important for young readers as they are forming perceptions of others. Then maybe they will rely less on stereotypes because they will know of stories they would not have read anywhere else.

Maw Books:  Knowing that the Asian-American experience is a recurring theme in your work why did you choose the particularly subjects that you did, i.e: Bruce Lee, internment camps, Vietnam War, etc. over other stories regarding Asian-Americans that could have been told?

Ken Mochizuki: The subjects selected to become books was just a matter of what would be a workable story at the time. Definitely, there are a lot more stories to be told. Combining the fact-based story of playing baseball, and that it was played in the World War II camps, seemed a natural to become “Baseball Saved Us.” “Heroes” was based in the Vietnam War –era since Asians being the wartime enemy was playing itself all over again. “Passage to Freedom: the Sughihara Story” was a matter of being in the right place at the right time, and I especially thought the story of a Japanese diplomat saving thousands of lives would be a good counter to usual stereotypes of the Japanese people. When I discovered and researched the intellectual, philosophical and spiritual Bruce Lee, I knew that was a story to be told. With “Beacon Hill Boys,” Asian American teenagers trying to act African American and searching for their own identity during the early ‘70s is out of my own experience.

Maw Books:  I have yet to read both Heroes and Beacon Hill Boys.  I’m going to seek both of these out.  What about young fictional heroes appeals to you as a writer?

Ken Mochizuki: I think their discovery of some aspect of themselves that they didn’t realize they possessed before, and how they convert that realization into something positive for themselves and for others. A good example is the young protagonist in “Baseball Saved Us” who didn’t think he had the power to hit home runs until he discovered mind over matter, that attitude determines altitude.

Maw Books:  In your book Baseball Saved Us, you use the word “Jap,” which is obviously being used in such a way that the reader knows it’s meant to be hurtful and is a bad name.  What is your reaction to the book being removed from a elementary school in New Milford, Connecticut?

Ken Mochizuki: I was initially baffled since, for the 13 years “Baseball Saved Us” had been used in schools around the country up until that time (2006), I had never heard any objection to the use of that word from librarians, teachers or parents within a school. The reason why, as you said, is because of the context the word is used in. For 13 years, teachers and school librarians obviously knew how to, and had the skills, to explain that word and what it means to their students. For the school board at New Milford, Conn. to cave in to the objection of one parent obviously shows that this school board had little faith in – or doubted – the ability of the district’s teachers and school librarians.

Maw Books:  Do your parents share their experiences with you about being sent to an internment camp during World War II?  How strong was their influence in your writing Baseball Saved Us?

Ken Mochizuki: To get my parents to talk about that experience is like pulling teeth. Rarely have they ever talked to me about that subject, although they have begun to share a little more within the past 10 years. “Baseball Saved Us” drew more on my own years as a journalist covering that subject – random stories told by those who were there, in particular – before writing the story.

Maw Books:  How interesting!  What drew you to the story that lead you to write Passage to Freedom?  What was it like to work with Hiroki Sugihara and to document his amazing family story?

Ken Mochizuki: During fall of 1994, Hiroki Sugihara, along with his mother, Yukiko, began touring their photo exhibit around the country called “Visas for Life.” They wished to make known the story of their father/husband, diplomat Chiune Sugihara. My editor at Lee & Low Books and I looked into this story, but how do we make it a children’s picture when subjects included Nazis, genocide, the Holocaust? When we came upon oldest son Hiroki telling this story as a five year old during the time, we knew we had the vehicle for a children’s book. When Hiroki came to a synagogue in Seattle to speak about his father’s exploits, he placed most of my research into my hands, his mother’s memoir, also titled “Visas for Life” which he self-published. And since Hiroki lived in San Francisco (he has since passed away), I was also able to interview him by phone.

I would say that this was the easiest book for me to research and write. Hiroki provided me with most of the research, and I just had to follow the facts in a story better than any fiction anyone could create. The reason I took it on also became obvious during a presentation about this book at Omaha, Neb. When a local educator told a school superintendent about this story, he replied: “I didn’t know the Japanese did anything good during World War II.”

Maw Books:  Amazing.  I loved Hiroki’s story.  What is it that you love the most about Bruce Lee?

Ken Mochizuki: That he was a voracious reader from young child through adult; that, as an adult, he always carried a book with him wherever he went and read anywhere and anytime he could. He was an educated and highly-disciplined man to become what he became, and there was a lot more to him than just the super-human fighting machine seen on the screen.

Maw Books:  You have collaborated with Dom Lee for all of your picture books.  What is the relationship between the writer and an illustrator, particularly your relationship with Dom Lee?

Ken Mochizuki: I didn’t know this for a good five years or more, but Lee & Low Books Publisher Philip Lee confirmed it when I heard him speak on a panel: He purposely kept Dom and I separate and not communicating with each other – as he did for all author/illustrator duos – so that the author would not influence the illustrator in any way, so that the illustrator would read the manuscript and totally execute his/her own interpretation of it.

I hadn’t communicated with Dom Lee in any way until we met a year after the publication of “Baseball Saved Us” at an educators’ conference in West Lafayette, Ind. There, we discussed “Heroes” before he began his work. At the same conference at the same place two years later, we had preliminary discussions on “Passage to Freedom.” It was a huge advantage for us to talk before he started drawing, even though I didn’t try to influence him in any way since I knew whatever he did would be good and what I had also envisioned. For us, we developed a communicative shorthand, could read each other’s mind, much like the way film directors often use the same cinematographer.

Maw Books:  How has working as a journalist and an actor influenced you as a children’s writer?

Ken Mochizuki:  Being a print journalist served as excellent training for becoming a children’s book writer, especially for picture books, since all require knowing how to say the most with the least amount of words. An actor studies human behavior, motivation – why do people do what they do? That comes into use when creating characters and their actions. Actors also have to be open-minded to deal with a variety of and unusual concepts (and other actors!) and that also aids in children’s book writing.

Maw Books:  What do you want your readers to come away with after reading one of your books?

Ken Mochizuki: They can interpret them any way they want, but, hopefully, they will come away with something they hadn’t known or realized before, and that they will gain traction with a positive theme such as attitude determines altitude (“Baseball”), the importance of passing down a family legacy (“Heroes”), that one person can make a difference, sometimes even a global one (“Passage to Freedom”), the importance of something in one’s own past to make oneself proud (“Beacon Hill Boys”), or might is not always right (Bruce Lee).

Maw Books:  Do you have a particular favorite among your books or one that you are most proud of?  Or is that like trying to pick among your children?

Ken Mochizuki:  That’s it! I am often asked by students what is my favorite of my books. I ask them if they have brothers or sisters. And what would their parents say if they were asked, “Out of all of us, who do you like the best?” They usually say something to the effect that the answer would be, “We love you all the same.” (Some say they would be picked the best!) The same with my books — they’re like my children: I gave birth to them, I raised them, I gave them the best I could and then I sent them out into the world hoping others would appreciate them. I add that I like different books for different reasons: the kinetic “Baseball,” “Heroes” with the most implicit themes even though it is the shortest (in terms of word count) of my books, the epic “Passage to Freedom” with its cast of hundreds, “Beacon Hill Boys” evoking a recent decade as history instead of nostalgia, Bruce Lee discovering his life’s philosophy in “Be Water, My Friend.”

Maw Books:  As an actor and journalist what inspired you to begin writing children’s books and how have those vocations influenced your writing?

Ken Mochizuki: A little history to answer this question: It was because of a classic case of serendipity. Up till 1991, my aspiration was to become a writer of adult novels. That year, I received a phone call from a Philip Lee in New York. He got my name from his wife, (the late children’s book writer) Karen Chinn, whom I knew from working on the same newspaper in Seattle. Philip said he had started the children’s picture book company, Lee & Low Books, and was searching the country for authors and illustrators for its first published books. I had never written anything for children or young adults, but then Philip suggested the topic that became my first picture book, “Baseball Saved Us.” The critical and commercial success of that book launched me into a now 16-year career.

I am asked if I like children’s picture books. My answer: I do now! Not only did the medium give me a new career, but also because it is a unique art form that weds my previous careers. As an actor, one of my aspirations was to become a film director. Watching directors at work, and later being one of the directors of a short dramatic film (“Beacon Hill Boys” film version) myself, and combining that with the appreciation of writing acquired through journalism, I think of picture books as my own little movies, since both are a visual medium. As director/screenwriter, I have to create something that my cinematographer can visualize.

I had the opportunity to utilize careers past and present when I wrote the “book” (everything not music and music lyrics) for a stage musical version of “Baseball Saved Us” first produced by Seattle’s 5th AvenueTheatre in 2003.

Maw Books:  What are the challenges of being a children’s book writer?

Ken Mochizuki:  Keeping the word count down!  I have never had not enough – always too much! People sometimes say to me: “Isn’t writing children’s books easy? Simple story, simple words … after all, it’s for children.” My response: “You try it, getting the story’s beginning, middle, end, conflict, character arc, resolution into 1,000 words or less, which is about five double-spaced pages. Then tell me if it’s easy.”

Maw Books:  What are some of your favorite experiences so far from book signings, school visits, interviews, and other promotional activities for your books?

Ken Mochizuki: Within the past 16 years, I have been invited to cities and towns around the United States and even in Germany once. Just the fact that I have been able to do that would be a “favorite experience.” Particularly rewarding for me is when a student or teacher tells me that one of my books has positively affected their lives. Another is when students at a school are thoroughly prepared for my visit and ask very adult questions. A memorable experience would be reading “Passage to Freedom” at the huge auditorium at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial in Washington, D.C. In Houston, Tex., while presenting at a private school there, I met a “Sugihara survivor.” She was three years old at the time when Sugihara issued her family the visa to escape from Lithuania, and she showed me the actual visa with Sugihara’s fountain-pen writing on it!

Maw Books:  Describe yourself as a reader. What books influenced and inspired you as a child? As an adult?

Ken Mochizuki: I would have to admit that the most influential book as a child was the set of World Book Encyclopedias at home. I ask students if they have done this: while flipping through the pages looking up a particular subject in the encyclopedia, they come upon and start reading other interesting subjects and eventually forget what they were looking up in the first place. With this ability to browse, encyclopedias in book form have the advantage over computer-based encyclopedias. I did a lot of that, fueling my interest in history – especially military history – and science, particularly astronomy and meteorology. My mother admonished that I should be reading more fiction.

However, not only my favorite books, but I think a couple of the greatest stories ever are “A Christmas Carol” and “The Wizard of Oz.” And as I ask students: the bulk of both stories take place in what state of mind? Answer: a dream. As an adult, I have been greatly influenced by the works of John Steinbeck – although I didn’t know it at the time when I read his books decades ago. I have particular admiration for authors who can not only tell a great story, but also are the social critics of their time. “The Grapes of Wrath” is not only a great story, but it also brought attention to the plight of the Okies. The greatest of them all in this category is “A Christmas Carol” when Dickens not only told a brilliant story, but also criticized the English aristocracy of the time. With these types of books as models, one of my own criteria is that my books address a social issue.

Maw Books:  What’s the last book you finished and what’s on your nightstand right now?

Ken Mochizuki: The last book I finished was “Dear Miss Breed” by Joanne Oppenheim, which is about a San Diego librarian who assisted Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II via the mail. Up next is “Looking Like the Enemy: My Story of Imprisonment in Japanese-American Internment Camps.” It’s not a children’s or YA book, but I need to read it for my own research – I am interviewing the author, Mary Matsuda Gruenewald, at a public forum next month. Yes, still working as a journalist, as I think I will always be in some capacity. It’s ironic that I have made a career out of the worst episode in my parents’ generation (the World War II incarceration experience). There are a ton of children’s and YA books that I want to and should read. And I want to get around to re-reading a couple of great books: An Na’s “A Step From Heaven” and Sherman Alexie’s “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.”

Maw Books:  This is a question that I ask of every single author I interview.  And that is to share with us a recipe, whether it appears in their books or just a personal favorite.  I later try to make these recipes and highlight them again on my blog.  Do you have a special dish or recipe that you would like to share?  And why this recipe?

Ken Mochizuki: Not anything that I would serve to anyone else.

Maw Books:  Ha, ha!  So, what do you do outside the world of books?

Ken Mochizuki: As noted above, I still do free-lance journalism work, am a fan of anything that tells a good story such as movies and some of the ‘60s pop music; I am an oldies and jazz freak, and I am a regular jogger – that’s when I get some of my writing ideas, when the (right?) side of my brain is occupied.

Maw Books:  I understand that you are currently working on a YA novel, set during the incarceration of Japanese Americans in American camps during World War II.  Can you share with us more about this and when we can expect to see it out?

Ken Mochizuki: Oops! I should have followed the advice of author Tom Wolfe: that to publicly announce a book that hasn’t been published yet is like announcing a duel – then you have to show up. I’ve made it a policy now not to talk about any book unless a contract is signed and it’s for sure. I will say this, though: the book publishing industry is suffering like all American businesses in our current economy, and nothing is certain.

Maw Books:  Anything else you’d like to add?

Ken Mochizuki: Interviews are always more fun and exciting when the interviewer has done the research and asks specific questions. You obviously did! What will give me an attitude for the rest of an interview is when the first question is: “So, what are your books about?”

So, thanks for a worthwhile interview!

Maw Books:  Aw, shucks Ken!  You’re making me blush!  But seriously, it was my pleasure to dive into your books and to have you with us today.  Thank you!

Thanks again to Ken Mochizuki for appearing, courtesy of Provato Marketing, for other stops on the tour please check www.provatoevents.com.

“Shorty” was thus nicknamed because he was smaller than all of his classmates.  He was always the last to picked for any team when they played games.  Everything got worse when he began to be called names that he didn’t understand and nobody talked to him.  His parents then pulled him out of school when it was time to move out of their house and into the horse stalls that was a temporary stop on their ultimate destination to a dusty and desolate barbed wired internment camp.

The longer they stayed there, the worse things got.  The youth were becoming more and more despondent and disrespectful to their elders.  Knowing that they needed a outlet, Shorty’s father decided that the camp would benefit from having a baseball field.  Soon, there were baseball games going on all the time for both kids and grown-ups.  Shorty played as well but this time around it wasn’t so bad because he was the same size as all of his other Japanese friends.  But  he didn’t like playing under the watchful eye of the gaurd in the security tower who seemed to scrutinize his every move under his dark sunglasses.  Shorty got so mad that he was determined to show that guard exactly what he was made of.  And he did!  Hitting the ball hard he made it all the way to home base and onto the shoulders of his teammates.

But that didn’t make everything better.  Eventually, Shorty and his family returned home to the same classmates who made fun of him before he left.  He was both taunted and ignored.  The book ends as Shorty is again playing baseball, but this time among his white peers.  But he had gotten better during his time of playing baseball in the camps.  Can he prove that he is just as good as his peers?

Ken Mochizuki does an excellent job showing why the Japanese were sent to internment camps, what life was like there, their attitudes towards themselves and their fellow Americans, as well as the difficult transition when they returned home.  As always, the illustrations by Dom Lee are wonderful.  Still mostly monochromatic, there is color in Baseball Saved Us, unlike most of Dom Lee’s other books.  The illustrations inside the camp were more bleak in color and the illustrations outside the camp were more vibrant in color.  A great comparison between the “outside world” and the camps.

Ken Mochizuki’s own parents were sent to internment camps during World War II.  Coming up next is a great author interview where Ken talks about his parents experience and how that influenced his writing of Baseball Saved Us.  Don’t miss it!  Ken is also the author of  Be Water, My Friend:  The Early Years of Bruce Lee (reviewed here),  Passage to Freedom: The Sugihara Story (reviewed here), Heroes, and the young adult novel Beacon Hill Boys.

On the same topic I recently read When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka (my book review) a book for adults that I really enjoyed, which was preceded by Weedflower by Cynthia Kadohata (my book review) a book for Young Adults.  Now I’ve come to Journey to Topaz, a book for Middle Readers.  All are fictionalized accounts but the first two are based on the author’s own experience and all follow the journey of Japanese Americans living in California in the 1940’s.  After the bombing of Pearl Harbor they are taken to the Tanforan Racetrack and literally live in horse stalls, and then they travel by train to Topaz, Utah where they are settle in a internment camp in the isolated desert.  I know there are a lot of books on this subject, but I have enjoyed these three that I have read this year.

To best summarize Journey to Topaz, I’d like to simply share with you the words of the author, Yoshicku Uchida, as written in the prologue (in 1984),

It has been many years since I first wrote Journey to Topaz and more than forty years since the United States government uprooted 120,000 West Coast Japanese Americans, without trial or hearing, and imprisoned them behind barbed wire.  Two-thirds of those Japanese Americans were American Citizens, and I was one of them.  We were imprisoned by our own country during World War II, not because of anything we had done, but simply because we looked like the enemy . . .

Journey to Topaz is the story of what happened to one Japanese American Family during this wartime tragedy, then called “the evacuation.”  Although the characters are fictional, the events are based on actual fact, and most of what happened to the Sakane family also happened to my own.  I wold ask readers to remember that my characters portray the Japanese Americans of 1942 an to recall that the world then was totally different from the one we know today.  In 1942 the voice of Martin Luther King had not yet been heard and ethnic pride was yet unborn.  There was no awareness in the land of civil rights, and there had yet been no freedom marches or demonstrations of protest . . .

I hope by reading this book young people everywhere will realize what once took place in this country and will determine never to permit such a travesty of justice to occur again.

I really enjoyed Journey to Topaz and it would be an excellent resource in the classroom or otherwise to introduce to children what happened during the Japanese-American evacuation.  Yoshiko Uchida is a prolific author with more than 30 books and anthologies.  I’d like to read her memoir titled The Invisible Thread:  An Autobiography, as well as Picture Bride.  Yoskido Uchida does not have a website but I did find an author study site for a college course which has a lot of information.

When The Emperor Was Divine is the story of a single family in California during WWII.  They could be like any other family.  But they’re not.  They’re Japanese.  And being Japanese during WWII was anything but easy.

The family in When the Emperor Was Divine could be about any Japanese family, this is illustrated by the fact that nobody is given a name.  The characters are simply referred to as mother, father, sister, and brother.  I love this technique simply for the reason that this story wasn’t just the story of one family.  It could have been about your neighbor, your friend or the family you see around town.  Thousands of Japanese went through exactly what this family went through.

In When the Emperor Was Divine, the family around which this story centers lives a nice life in California with a nice home, friendly enough neighbors, and school friends.  But their world is torn apart on December 7th because of two simple words:  Pearl Harbor.  From that moment on, they are considered “enemy aliens.”  A few days later, the father is arrested and taken away with just a toothbrush and the slippers on his feet.  With the father gone, the mother must prepare her family for relocation to an internment camp in the desert of Utah.  The story takes us through their three years away from their home, their time in the Utah desert and how they are received when they finally make their way back home.

The story is told in alternating viewpoints from each member of the family and works really well for this story to illustrate how each is affected. The writing is absolutely beautiful.  When The Emperor Was Divine is short but packs a lot of punch.  I was especially interested in the book because Topaz is in my home state of Utah.  Every year my family goes to the Japanese festival downtown and they always have a huge display up that showcases Topaz through photos, physical items, and even those who once lived there in attendance.  It really brings the whole thing alive for me.

While reading When the Emperor Was Divine I couldn’t help but think of Weedflower by Cynthia Kadohata (read my book review), a Young Adult book, because the events of both books are exactly the same.  Both families are from California, both lived in the horse stalls at the race track, both boarded trains and left their home for Utah.  I highly recommend both of these books.

Anybody have any other book recommendations about the Japanese in the United States during WWII?  I know there’s a lot out there and I’d love to get my hands on more.

Edited to add:  I’ve just picked up two ex-library copies of When the Emperor Was Divine that I’ll be giving away as part of the Reading & Blogging for Darfur campaign.  Click here for details on what you need to do to be eligible to win.

So the only books that I can “browse” through quickly are the ones on the display cases. Weedflower by Cynthia Kadohata was one of those books, which was funny because I was also holding Kira-Kira (see my review here) in my hand, which I had just picked up from a hold. So I picked this book based off of the cover alone because I didn’t even have time to read the dust jacket before I was off chasing my toddler again. I knew it had to be about Japanese Americans being sent to internment camps during WWII, and luckily, I was right about that. After I finished reading Weedflower I looked at the cover again and thought, strange, not once in this book does Sumiko, the main character, ever wear a kimino. Although the cover was not 100% true to the book, it got the message across enough to have me want to read it. I do think it’s a beautiful cover.

In Weedflower, twelve year old Sumiko, just wants to belong in a town with very little Japanese Americans. She finally is invited to a classmates birthday party and can not stop thinking about how wonderful it’s going to be. Sadly, the classmates mother, who didn’t know there was a Japanese girl in her daughters class turns her away at the door. Sumiko is not only heartbroken, but also humiliated as well.

But she doesn’t have very long to think about it because the very next day Japan bombs Pearl Harbor and her life changes forever. Sumiko and her family are forced to leave their beautiful, colorful and deeply scented flower farm and live in a hot, ugly, wasteland of a place internment camp for the duration of the war. Sumiko and her family must make adjustments, learn how to cope, and survive in their now “unfair” situation. But during this time Sumiko is able to to make a new friend, learns how to work hard and create beauty in her surroundings.

Besides being reminded of how the Japanese Americans were treated during WWII, I especially enjoyed the references to growing gardens. This is the gardener part of me coming out. I’m the type of person who needs lots of color in their life. I can’t stand dreary things. I am also the type of person who needs a lot of living things around me (just visit inside my house where I have about 25+ house plants). And I’m also the type who can see the space around me and visualize what it could look like with some tender loving care. So in these ways I felt like I could relate to Sumiko, who missed her fields of flowers and was sick of seeing nothing but brown nothingness. As a result, she starts a little flower garden that she works on in hopes of winning a gardening competition in her camp. While all the other teenagers were getting into trouble, all the adults joked that they only thing Sumiko cared about was her dirt. Which whenever she talks about trying to improve her “dirt” I had to smile to myself because when taking my Master Gardener class, you never referred to “soil” as “dirt.” Dirt is what gets on your clothes and underneath your fingernails, soil is what you plant in. Dirt was a four letter word that you wouldn’t get caught dead saying.

Anyways, I’ve been rambling on enough. I feel like this review is more about me than the book! I highly recommend Weedflower. I thought it was enjoyable and enlightening while giving the reader some great insight to how Japanese Americans (and Native Americans) were treated during WWII.

I knew I had to read Kira-Kira by Cynthia Kadohata after seeing it recently floating around in the blogosphere. Plus it won the 2005 Newbery Medal and one of my “life reading goals” is to read all the Newbery’s. Plus, on top of that I’ve always enjoyed any stories with an Asian flair. Plus, on top of the top, I loved the book cover. Absolutely intriguing.

My uncle was exactly one inch taller than my father. But his stomach was soft. We knew this because we hit him in it once the year before, and he yelped in pain and threatened to spank us. We got sent to bed without supper because my parents said hitting someone was the worst thing you could do. Stealing was second, and lying was third.
Before I was twelve, I would have committed all three of those crimes.

Sounds intriguing, doesn’t it? And yes, I’m aware of the fact that I just used the word intriguing to describe the book cover.  So, it is best to conclude that Kira-Kira is an intriguing book.  And because I can’t summarize it better than the book jacket:

Glittering. That’s how Katie Takeshima’s sister, Lynne, makes everything seem. The sky is kira-kira because its color is deep but see-through at the same time. The sea is kira-kira frot he same reason. And so are people’s eyes. When Katie and her family move from a Japanese community in Iowa to the Deep South of Georgia, it’s Lynn who explains to her why people stop them on the street to stare. And it’s Lynn who, with her speial way of viewing the world, teaches Katie to look beyond tomorrow. But when Lynn becomes desperately ill and the whole family begins to fall apart, it is up to Katie to find a way to remind them all that there is always something glittering — kira-kira — in the future.

This book covers it all. From the friendship and love between two sisters to family dynamics, struggling to make ends meet, racism, prejudice, discrimination, harsh working conditions in the factories, the American dream, illness, death, grief, honesty, and pushing forward with life. I knew from the first few pages that this was going to be a sad story. I was drawn into this family’s story. I wanted to ease their pain and suffering. I wanted everything to turn out all right. I felt that Lynne’s thoughts and feelings were so honest and true. Her character touched me.

I would highly recommend this book to readers of all ages and felt it deserving of the Newbery. I seriously don’t know how Cynthia could have packed one more “theme” into this book, it certainly gave me a lot to think about and learn from. I enjoyed it and have Cynthia Kadohata’s book Weedflower on the shelf for one of my next reads. I am looking forward to it.

Visit Cynthia Kadohata’s website here.
Other great blogger reviews of this book include Shelf Elf, The Well Read Child, and A Patchwork of Books. Check them out.