Middle Grade Fiction: Weedflower, by Cynthia Kadohata

 

Title: Weedflower

Author:  Cynthia Kadohata

Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2006

Source: Library

Publisher's Summary:

Twelve-year-old Sumiko feels her life has been made up of two parts: before Pearl Harbor and after it. The good part and the bad part. Raised on a flower farm in California, Sumiko is used to being the only Japanese girl in her class. Even when the other kids tease her, she always has had her flowers and family to go home to.

That all changes after the horrific events of Pearl Harbor. Other Americans start to suspect that all Japanese people are spies for the emperor, even if, like Sumiko, they were born in the United States! As suspicions grow, Sumiko and her family find themselves being shipped to an internment camp in one of the hottest deserts in the United States. The vivid color of her previous life is gone forever, and now dust storms regularly choke the sky and seep into every crack of the military barrack that is her new "home."

Sumiko soon discovers that the camp is on an Indian reservation and that the Japanese are as unwanted there as they'd been at home. But then she meets a young Mohave boy who might just become her first real friend...if he can ever stop being angry about the fact that the internment camp is on his tribe's land.

My Review:

This is a well-written piece of historical fiction. Any reader will feel the injustice of the Japanese internment in WWII, as well as the hurt of any child who is rejected for reasons she can't even fully understand. In that, it's a powerful work, and well worth the reading. The book gives the reader a good introduction to what that decision on the part of the US government did to individuals, families, and an entire culture. The author only touches on something that was a major problem, the destruction of the family unit as children banded together and ate apart from their parents or even other siblings, and as families were torn apart by the question of signing the loyalty oath.

The book did feel flawed to me, however, in a couple of ways. One isn't so much a flaw as just how it is put together: the two parts of Sumiko's life almost end up feeling like two separate books, though I think the first part is necessary. The reader needs to see Sumiko doing daily things--not exactly what the reader does, but things that feel human and ordinary and include kid things like sometimes resenting chores--in order to feel fully the shock of the uprooting.

The other issue I had is worse, though I'm not sure how I'd fix it. That is quite simply that the conflict in the story is so huge, and so far beyond Sumiko, that there is no sense really of the development of a story, and certainly no sense of resolution. I don't know; maybe that is just as well if you want to keep the focus on the real injustice. Certainly the characters are well-drawn, so that we care about Sumiko and her life. And I appreciated the way that she, as children do, becomes at home in the camp--at home enough to not want to leave and start yet again. And maybe the fact that she's given no choice about that, either (by the adults in her own family, this time) is no accident: kids are blown by parental winds, in a smaller and more benign echo of what was done to an entire population.

Recommendation:

Weedflower is a good book for introducing children to this aspect of WWII. It is suitable for any kids old enough to cope with the frustration at the injustice (maybe 8 and up, depending on the child). I can also recommend books by Yoshiko Uchida, both fiction and her personal narrative (suitable for older children; some libraries put it in adult biographies, some in kids'), and for adults, Looking Like the Enemy, by Mary Matsuda Gruenewald (in the interests of full disclosure, her brother was my Sunday School teacher long, long ago) which tells of one family's experience being deported from the Pacific Northwest to camps in Idaho and Montana.

FTC Disclosure: I checked Weedflower out of my library, and received nothing from the writer or publisher in exchange for my honest review.  The opinions expressed are my own and those of no one else.  I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission's 16 CFR, Part 255: "Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising."  

The Ninja Librarian and Return to Skunk Corners on sale--just 99 cents for the month of July!

 

Friday Flash: Sleep

This week Chuck Wendig challenged us to write a story in which insomnia plays some role. I picked on poor Xavier Xanthum again, and went just 3 words over the 1000-word limit.

Sleep

Xavier Xanthum, Space Explorer, was regretting having landed on his latest discovery. Granted, it was what he did. And the planet looked good; money in the bank if it checked out. Larry’s scans had shown no particular hazards or dangerous life-forms.

Larry didn’t make many mistakes. Xavier was pretty sure, looking at the five-legged beast with very large teeth, that he’d made one this time. The creature looked dangerous, and Xavier didn’t want to stick around to find out if he was right.

The trouble was, he was too far from the landing pod to retreat. Xavier couldn’t even begin to imagine how a five-legged creature could keep track of its feet, let alone run, but he was pretty sure the mind behind those teeth knew the answer. There was only one place to go, and Xavier went.

The planet had a lot of plant life. Xavier had had to hunt for a clear place to land the pod, and had ventured into the forest—though the “trees” were like nothing he’d seen before—to inventory resources. Now he glanced up, happy to see that the strange plants at least had branches, and leapt.

If the planet hadn’t had lower-than-standard gravity, he couldn’t have managed it. As it was, his feet were barely out of range of those teeth when the creature charged. Xavier resolved to make more use of the fitness pod on the Wanderlust, as he did every time he got into trouble dirtside. Really, a space explorer ought to be able to do one pull-up, anyway!

The teeth had taken up a station under the tree, and the beast had this much in common with Earth animals: it drooled in anticipation of a meal. Xavier climbed to a higher branch and made himself more comfortable.

“Comfortable,” Xavier decided an hour later, was a relative term. Nothing about his perch was comfortable except when compared to the first branch, or to being eaten by a set of large teeth with five legs. It did allow him to balance well enough to hold on with only one hand. With the other he dug out his communicator.

“Larry? Can you read me, Larry?”

“Location?” Larry sounded human, but his computer nature showed in his priorities. No “how are you?” or “what’s wrong?” from him. Xavier didn’t mind. He needed rescuing, and sentiment wouldn’t help.

“I’m not sure. Can’t you spot me?”

“Excessive vegetative cover.”

Xavier figured out that meant “too many trees,” and tried to figure out where he was.

“I’m about a 10-minute walk uphill from the pod.”

“Nature of the emergency?” For an AI with (presumably) no feelings of his own, Larry was pretty good at picking up on Xavier’s feelings.

“I’m stuck up a tree.”

“You are unable to descend?”

“There’s a large and I’m pretty sure carnivorous animal at the base of the tree.” He couldn’t keep the accusation out of his voice. After all, Larry had cleared the planet as safe.

“I see.”

Xavier waited. Since an AI could think at amazing speeds, Xavier didn’t like the implications of his continued silence.

“Can’t you help me?”

As though reluctantly, Larry said, “I can’t even find you.”

“What should I do?!” Xavier couldn’t help it, his voice rose a bit, somewhere between petulance and panic.

“Hang on.”

Xavier broke the connection.

He looked down at the teeth.

He looked up in hopes of finding a better perch. Then he sighed. “It has to get tired of waiting sometime,” he told himself.

#

Perhaps he should have told the creature that it must get bored, because it didn’t seem to know.

The sun was nearing the horizon, and the teeth were still waiting. Xavier found a branch where he could sit more comfortably, but he couldn’t relax.

Nor, he realized, as the sun tipped out of sight and the animal still waited, could he sleep. He really couldn’t do much except hang on, and occasionally harass Larry in hopes of getting a better answer.

It was a long night. Part of the time he played word games with Larry, who of course always won. Being a computer gave him an unfair advantage when it came to vocabulary.

When it got cold, Xavier climbed around to different branches for a while, to warm up, then settled down to a joke competition with Larry. He could usually win those, because Larry was still working on understanding humor. He said it was the hardest human attribute to analyze. Between jokes he thought about lying down and sleeping.

The third moon was setting when Larry said, “I’ve located you. I’ve matched com signals and IR markers.”

“So can you get me out of here?”

“No.”

“Can’t you blast the teeth or something?”

“Not without blasting you as well. Is that your command?”

Sometimes it was hard to tell if Larry had developed a sense or humor.

#

When the sun came up, the creature sat up, stretched, and organized its five legs. Then it trotted off into the woods.

Xavier waited, not trusting the beast, until Larry reported that the creature was well away and moving steadily up the hill.

At last the marooned space explorer dropped to the ground, hobbling off as fast as cramped limbs permitted in the direction of the pod. He was nearly there when he heard a noise, and looked back to see a half a dozen of the five-legged teeth-creatures coming at him, moving fast.

Xavier discovered he could run. He cleared the hatch inches ahead of the teeth, and slammed the cover in manual mode.

Hovering over the clearing minutes later, he looked down. The animals sat in a circle, looking up. He thought about vaporizing them, but refrained. It was their planet, and now he was off it, they could have it. He was headed for Wanderlust and a long sleep.

#

Two hours later, Xavier Xanthum lay in his bunk, eyes wide open. He was looking at the ceiling, but still seeing teeth.

Insomnia.

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©Rebecca M. Douglass, 2016
As always, please ask permission to use any photos or text. Link-backs appreciated!

Summer reading sale--The Ninja Librarian and Return to Skunk Corners--just 99 cents!

And yes, work is underway, slowly, on Book 3, The Problem of Peggy

 

IWSG

This month the IWSG has a prompt (maybe we do every month? I can be so slow to pick up on these things). That's convenient, because I didn't know what to write about this time, except to fret some more because I'm not actually writing this summer. So far, I'm mostly traveling. Which is totally cool, except...my book! It's not happening!

Okay, so the prompt is  

What's the best thing someone has ever said about your writing?

It looks so easy. It would be easy just to say it's, "When's the next book coming?" and that's even fairly true. I mean, especially the first time a reader indicated how eager she was for the next book it was a total thrill. And basically every time someone leaves a comment on my blog (especially on the flash fiction) telling me that they loved the story I just posted, I pretty much do a happy dance.

But maybe the best thing anyone has ever said was about my first published book, The Ninja Librarian. The president of our local teacher's union read the book (yeah, so she's a friend), and her comments weren't just "I loved it" which would have been exciting enough. No, she took it seriously. She commented on themes and motifs that I didn't even realize had found there way in there. In other words, she read it like a teacher, and responded to it as she might to any book for kids, not just as a book written by a friend. (Melinda, if you're reading this, did I ever tell you how much that email meant to me?). In fact, I'm going to quote her here:

I especially liked the fact that it had a strong feminist message, in fact all kind of messages about reading, nonviolence, unwed mothers, and more.  Yet these potentially weighty messages were barely detectable, because you told it all in such an entertaining, hilarious, non-dogmatic style.  It was a great summer read! I hope to pass it on to many readers.

Thinking about that, I realize that the best thing you can say to/do for a writer is to take her seriously. Read her book as you would any book, and respond thoughtfully. 

That, and it doesn't hurt to have a kid occasionally jump up and down in the grocery store and yell, "Mommy! That's the lady who wrote The Ninja Librarian!" 


The monthly IWSG is a blog hop. Please check out some of the other writers, and leave some words of encouragement on their blogs!

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Summer reading sale--The Ninja Librarian and Return to Skunk Corners--just 99 cents!

And yes, work is underway, slowly, on Book 3, The Problem of Peggy