Burlington Public Library

The story of a farm family's Depression-era journey from the Dustbowl of Oklahoma to the California migrant labor camps in search of a better life.

"In 1938, Ruby, Helen and Grace, three girls from very different backgrounds, find themselves competing at the same audition for showgirl roles at San Francisco's exclusive 'Oriental' nightclub, the Forbidden City. Grace, an American-born Chinese girl has fled the Midwest and an abusive father. Helen is from a Chinese family who have deep roots in San Francisco's Chinatown. And, as both her friends know, Ruby is Japanese passing as Chinese. At times...

"Ten-year-old Manami does not realize how peaceful her life on Bainbridge Island, Washington, is until the day it all changes. It's 1942, shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and Manami and her family are forced by the government to leave their home by the sea and join other Japanese Americans at a prison camp in the California desert. Manami is sad to go, but, even worse, her family must give her dog, Yujiin, to a neighbor to take care...

"After Pearl Harbor is bombed by the Japanese, twelve-year-old Tomi and her Japanese-American family are split up and forced to leave their California home to live in internment camps in New Mexico and Colorado"--

At the start of World War II, Japanese-American third-grader Aki and her family are sent to an internment camp in Poston, Arizona, while Mexican-American third-grader Sylvia's family leases their Orange County, California, farm and begins a fight to stop school segregation.

"Rita Takemitsu is a newly single mother raising her daughter in 1980s Toronto. When her mother, Lily, goes missing, Rita sets out to find her. In the course of her quest, Rita uncovers a host of secrets surrounding her mother's internment at a camp in the California desert during the Second World War and the truth about her mysterious father."--

Drawing on her firsthand experiences in a Japanese internment camp during World War II, Houston (author of the memoir Farewell to Manzanar) again explores a shameful episode of American history in this heartfelt debut novel. Women born under the inauspicious sign of the fire horse are too beautiful, powerful and cunning to be humble wives-this makes them "outcasts in Japan, but heroines in America where they must realize this feminine power in order...

"On December 7, 1941 -- "a date which will live in infamy" -- the Japanese navy launched an attack on the American military bases at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The next day, President Franklin Roosevelt declared war on Japan, and the US Army officially entered the Second World War. Three years later, on December 18, 1944, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which enabled the Secretary of War to enforce a mass deportation of more than 100,000...

"Chicago, 1944: twenty-year-old Aki Ito and her parents have just been released from Manzanar, the California concentration camp where they have been "interned" by the US government since the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, together with thousands of other Japanese Americans. The life the Itos were forced to leave behind is gone; instead, they are being resettled in Chicago, where Aki's older sister, Rose, was sent months earlier as a forerunner of the...

Augie Schuler is desperate for love, the kind "normal" families provide. And when she meets Sunny Yamagata and her family, Augie knows she's found what she's looking for in spite of cultural differences. Together, the two girls pursue the fanciful dreams of youth and a sometimes humorous search for God beneath the bright California sun. When the dark days of World War II and the Japanese internment camps tear them apart, they vow never to forget each...