I'm a big fan of George Takei and his musical, Allegiance. Noticing this, a friend of mine recommended this book to me.
I had no idea there existed a children's book about the Japanese internment! In my own public education, I do not remember learning about World War II until high school (if we learned about it in middle school, I've forgotten), and we absolutely did not learn about Japanese internment. Even though this book is probably geared towards upper elementary and middle school-aged readers, I think it's a worthy read for any first-time student of World War II.
In many ways, this book reads like a non-fiction account of the internment. It's told from the perspective of an 11-year-old girl, but basically she relates heartbreaking detail after heartbreaking detail of what many Japanese-Americans experienced during this time. The topic is presently simply, but it isn't simplified; the book gets across the complexities of the situation. It's clear that what the government was doing was wrong, but what choice did the Japanese-Americans have?
One detail lacking in this account is the controversial "loyalty questionnaire", which was part of how the government decided who would be allowed to enlist in the all-Japanese regiment. I can understand, though, how that part of the history could be especially difficult for a young reader to comprehend, and the book did still manage to convey the different attitudes held by internees, i.e., that some people were willing to fight for the U.S. to prove their loyalty, while others refused to fight for a nation that was treating them like criminals.
I think this book is an excellent window into the Japanese interment, but I gave it 4 stars for two reasons. The first is because, as I mentioned, the book reads kind of like a non-fiction account - the narrative makes it easy to read, but mostly the book is rich in factual detail. It felt more like I was reading about the Japanese internment itself, not so much "one girl's experience" of the Japanese internment. Perhaps, though, I should consider that this book is probably many people's first introduction to the Japanese internment, so in that regard, this book does a wonderful job of making the topic approachable.
I also found the ending too abrupt. The story follows one family as they are evacuated from their homes and sent to live in an internment camp in the desert, but it stops short when that one family is able to obtain a kind of release to go to Salt Lake City. So they were lucky. But how come other families weren't so lucky? What happened to them? How did the camps finally come to close, and how did all those Japanese-Americans re-integrate into society? Were they able to get back all the things they put into storage? Were they able to gain back their livelihoods? Did Ken ever finish college and become a doctor?! So many questions left unanswered. I don't know if the author always intended to write a sequel, but I found out from reading other people's reviews of this book that a sequel, Journey Home, was published seven years after Journey to Topaz, and I do intend to read it as soon as I can.
