(4.5 Star)

Wow.

Wow, wow, wow, wow. This book is INCREDIBLE and I am so glad we read this for my lit class. This is a part of history that is often brushed over in history class, resorted to only a couple of paragraphs of reading. This memoir is both informative on what happened in the camps, specifically in Manzanar, but it is also incredibly heartfelt, and made me cry on multiple occasions.

In this, the author, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, really goes through her own experiences and shows what it was like to grow up, to have your life really begin in such a place. One of the refrains she mentions a couple of times is how the camp is where her and her father's lives intersected, hers beginning there and his ending there. These are not literal meanings, Papa survived a great many years after the closing of the camp, and Jeanne was born several years prior to its opening. However, it is a metaphorical beginning/ending. Jeanne really came into the world in the camp, and you can see her explorations with this from within the camp but also, later on, after her and her family left the camp, where she was thrown into middle school where she was either invisible or actively discriminated against.

What this memoir does is highlight both the needle that is left within someone after having been forced to go through this experience and also the resilience that her and her family had when having to live in the camp and make it work for themselves.

I could go on and on, include some of my favorite quotes, talk about how this is the first book I've read where I've really paid attention to and appreciated chapter titles, but it would just end up being unstructured ramblings. All I can say is: read this. Please.