We all learned quite a bit here, and my daughters were fascinated by the lantern festival of Obon. The suffering is kept at a preteen level, and both of my girls found it relatable. The author was also clever enough to know that middle grades readers may not understand the full ramifications of an internment camp, but they don't need to work too hard to imagine the pain experienced by a soldier grabbing your only dog out of your arms. You feel that you are with Manami on this traumatic experience. This is typically a technique that is a “deal-breaker” for me as a reader, but she manages to make it work well here. Sepahban uses a narrative that stays in the first person, and the present tense. This debut novel, Paper Wishes, doesn't go into too much of the name calling or the restrictive laws set against the Japanese in America, but the author, Lois Sepahban, is extremely effective in showing what happens to one girl, Manami Tanaka, when her family is forced to evacuate their home in Bainbridge Island, Washington to the Manzanar internment camp in the California desert. My girls are Chinese-American, not Japanese, but it was difficult for all of us to read about the blatant racism that had plagued the Japanese in America for many decades before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. I've been hesitant to tackle the topic of the Japanese internment camps with my daughters, but I wanted the Western portion of our American reading project to involve as many Asian-American writers as possible, and it was tough to avoid this topic.
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