Reviews with content warning for Racial slurs - Displacement

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Displacement by Kiku Hughes

17 reviews

klsreads's review against another edition

adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

This is a sweet story, a mix of fact and fantasy. Kiku writes and illustrates her journey as a mixed-race, queer Japanase-American unearthing her family history in WWII internment camps. (She refers to interment camps as incarceration camps throughout the book, and rightly so). A magic fog transports her back in time to experience the racism and fearmongering about Asian Americans in the 1940's. Kiku is incarcerated in a room next to her grandmother and great-grandparents and follows their life while cultivating her own in the camp. This is a story about alienation from culture, generational trauma, and the moored "otherness" of multiply marginalized identities. It moved a bit slowly at some points, but it's rich with history, and the art is beautiful. Shamefully, I learned a lot from this short graphic novel. It's a beautiful and real tale of resistance and reconnection.

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kaykitty24's review against another edition

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challenging emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

What a wonderful graphic novel! The writer clearly spent lots of time researching Japanese Incarceration. I appreciated their specificity and commentary about the period was beautifully done. Definitely recommend to anyone! Once again, these stories are so necessary and important to talk about! Thank you, Kiku Hughes, from one hapa to another! 😊💞

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justcallmeemily's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional informative reflective fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

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porkkutletbowl's review

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emotional hopeful informative fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

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theabee's review against another edition

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challenging emotional informative inspiring reflective sad fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

Beautifully and poignantly written and illustrated

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robinks's review against another edition

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challenging emotional informative inspiring mysterious reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

I had a feeling this book would be quite sad and informative about history, but I was surprised by the incorporation of current struggles and recognition of various forms of resistance.

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emily_mh's review

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emotional hopeful informative medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

This story is about Kiku, a displaced girl who is landed in the displacement of a whole group of people, namely Japanese-Americans in WWII. She’s on a journey learning about why she feels so disconnected from her Japanese heritage; that it’s because her ancestors were forcefully disconnected from theirs. Her story is about generational trauma and how this can reach through time to affect the present and future. Hughes draws parallels between the generational trauma of Japanese-Americans from WWII, and the generational trauma being generated right now in the US with racist, xenophobic, and Islamophobic immigration policy that lands people in border detainment/incarceration.

Hughes also emphasises the power of memory, of remembering. Both are galvanising and unifying and instructive. I particularly loved this quote on the topic: “But when a community comes together to demand more, when we do not let trauma stay obscured but bring it up to the surface and remember it together - we can make sure it is not repeated.” I also loved this quote, how it implies the consequence of not remembering the past: “Being from the future meant very little when my education on the past was so limited.”

Overall, this story provided a massive learning curve for me regarding the incarceration camps. This is the first book I’ve read on them and I learnt so much. The book is written with Kiku as both MC and narrator which works well, as the story she tells is deeply informative and takes you through all kinds of aspects of the incarceration. Specific facts that have stuck with me are the information about No-Nos, and the discussion on how white people used Japanese-Americans’ history of incarceration camps to feed into model-minority myth in the 60s.

I think that in terms of the medium, there could have been a bit of editing of the panels. There was an excess of landscape and context panels that was unnecessary and led to repetition. But the art style was good; I particularly liked the cleanness of the lines and the fact that the panels weren’t overcrowded.

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bleuennreads_'s review against another edition

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emotional informative medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

I am very happy to have found this graphic novel because I was able to really learn more about a period of history that I didn't know much about.

In this story, the author stages herself, following in the footsteps of her grandmother to learn more about her past and that of her community. She therefore finds herself in the 1940s (this present/past transfer brings a little bit of science fiction to the story which is quite pleasant), sent to a detention camp alongside other Japanese-American citizens (including her grandmother). Kiku will live there for more than a year, which allows us to get a vague idea of the daily life of these people who were unjustly and forcibly detained. The only small negative point that is that I would have liked to know more, but the book is still very interesting and quite light while dealing with an important subject. An ever topical subject : the story takes on the backdrop of Trump's anti-Muslim speeches, allowing this trip to the past to echo the present and alarm about the potential risk of a return to the past (by registering immigrants).

To end on a lighter note, the designs are really beautiful although quite minimalistic. There is also a bit of lesbian romance and even if it's absolutely not the main subject of the book, it's always nice to see representation !

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rakkaussipsi's review against another edition

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emotional informative reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

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lhraine's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging inspiring reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I couldn't put it down. I was a little surprised that this was not just based off of history but the author's grandmother's history. The world always could use more books on history. This particular book is a mixture of fiction and non fiction which I loved. I wouldn't even mind re-reading this book every year. That's how amazing this book is! I would recommend this book to anyone that likes graphic novels and fiction non fiction mixture.

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