A Boy of Heart Mountain

Shigeru Yabu, a Japanese boy, and his family must leave their comfortable home in San Francisco for the Japanese-American detention camp in Heart Mountain, Wyoming, during WWII. Narrator Ova Saopeng brings this sad chapter in American history to life. Using subtle Japanese intonation, Saopeng performs this story of Shigeru Yabu's childhood, his adaptation to life in Wyoming, and the world of the detention camp. Prejudice and intolerance are some of the difficult themes of this biography. Throughout it all, 11-year-old Yabu tells of good and bad times and long days of endless snow and excessive heat. Saopeng shifts intonation to differentiate between the adults and the children and smoothly shifts from English to Japanese. This coming-of-age story sheds light on the lives and fears of some of the 120,000 Japanese-Americans who were interned during the early 1940s. M.B.K. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine