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emily_mh's review
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.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Racism and Xenophobia
Moderate: Death, Grief, and War
Minor: Cancer, Confinement, Drug use, Gun violence, Racial slurs, Terminal illness, Blood, Excrement, Vomit, Islamophobia, Medical content, Death of parent, Fire/Fire injury, and Injury/Injury detail
Major: Japanese-American incarceration camps Moderate: forced separation fro loved ones, loss of a loved one Minor: nuclear warfare