Dust of Eden

April 1, 2014

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

Copyright 2014 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2014
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)

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