Book review: Displacement by Kiku Hughes

    In this graphic novel, Kiku is transported back in time to1940's San Francisco - where her grandmother was a teenager. At the time, Japanese Americans faced a lot of racial discrimination in the United States. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, the U.S. government rounded up all Japanese-Americans on the West Coast, forced them to leave their homes, businesses and communities and moved them into camps in rural areas of the western United States.  It felt these legal immigrants and American citizens represented a potential threat to the U.S. because of their ancestral ties to Japan. Kiku's grandmother and her family are sent to one of these camps and Kiku ends up in the same camp. While there, Kiku experiences first hand what life was like for her grandmother and others who tried to make a life for themselves in a hostile environment.  

    Reading this historical fiction novel gives you insight into what life was like for the first and second generation Japanese Americans (check out the glossary at the back of the book for translations of the Japanese terms used in the story). Now 80 years later, Japanese Americans are still impacted by the camps. Many of those in the internment camps rarely spoke of their time there and as a result, even their families did not know about their wartime experiences. Through reading stories like Displacement, we build empathy and make progress towards understanding the full effect of these forgotten periods on our collective history. This knowledge in turn helps us to identify injustice, helps us to prevent violations of civil liberties and empowers us to stand up with those who are unfairly targeted. What  makes this book powerful is the connections drawn between the experiences of the Japanese Americans during World War II and the headlines of today. 

    For more information, I also highly recommend checking out Densho - a website which is dedicated to preserving the experiences of Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II. 

This book is available in the Nashua South Media Center. 

Book Review: Guantanamo Voices: True Accounts from the World's Most Infamous Prison / Edited by Sarah Mirk

 

Sick Day Book Review.

I can't remember the last time I took a sick day - this might be a once a decade happening for me. But this morning I was hit by the migraine fairy and was incapable of doing anything but sitting in the dark. Eventually, the fairy loosened her grip and I could read a bit if the light was dim and it was quiet.

So how do I spend a sick day (after I slept through first block?) I start a knitting project that matches the colors of my book that I am reading. (And drink LOTS of water - doesn't water heal everything?)

This is a terribly sad and confusing story well told through a series of interviews. The interviewees all had Guantanamo connections - from prisoners to attorneys to NCIS. Then the interviews were placed in a comic strip format and each interview was illustrated by a different artist. The color scheme pulls the book together - all in sunset colors (as is my knitting project - that is a coincidence.)

This story makes my heart hurt, but I am glad that I read it.

Guantanamo Voices will soon be found on the Nashua South shelves (I just need to figure out where to put it), on the shelves at the Nashua Public Library and through NPL's Hoopla.