bookshelf

A MILLION SHADES OF GRAY

Name: A MILLION SHADES OF GRAY
Author: Cynthia Kadohata
ISBN: 978-1-4169-1883-7

by Cynthia Kadohata ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 5, 2010

bookshelf

War has never been far from Y’Tin’s life. He’d grown fond of the jovial American soldiers his father had helped over the years, and now, in 1973, the North Vietnamese army is menacing South Vietnam—even his isolated Montagnard village. Still, “[a]ll his father thought about was the war, and all Y’Tin thought about was elephants.” While it’s true that Y’Tin, a matter-of-fact 13-year-old with an easy confidence, obsesses about Lady, his hardworking elephant charge, she becomes only one of his many concerns. In a clear-as-a-bell third-person voice, with warmth and humor, Kadohata fully rounds out the character of Y’Tin—the way he loves and thinks, often measuring his own responses to the world with those of his ever-deliberating, never-wrong father. As he and Lady escape from the massacre that kills half the village, Y’Tin sees that between right and wrong are “a million shades of gray,” like the elephant’s hide, like the jungle in the dim light. A fascinating window into post–Vietnam War history and a wonderfully intimate character study. (author’s note) (Historical fiction. 10-14)

Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2010

ISBN: 978-1-4169-1883-7

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Atheneum

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009

Categories:

CHILDREN'S ANIMALS | CHILDREN'S HISTORICAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
UNDER THE FADING SKY
by Cynthia Kadohata

- BOOK REVIEW
SAUCY
by Cynthia Kadohata ; illustrated by Marianna Raskin

- BOOK REVIEW
A PLACE TO BELONG
by Cynthia Kadohata ; illustrated by Julia Kuo

bookshelf

DUST OF EDEN

by Mariko Nagai ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2014

An engaging novel-in-poems that imagines one earnest, impassioned teenage girl’s experience of the Japanese-American...

bookshelf

Crystal-clear prose poems paint a heart-rending picture of 13-year-old Mina Masako Tagawa’s journey from Seattle to a Japanese-American internment camp during World War II.

This vividly wrought story of displacement, told from Mina’s first-person perspective, begins as it did for so many Japanese-Americans: with the bombs dropping on Pearl Harbor. The backlash of her Seattle community is instantaneous (“Jap, Jap, Jap, the word bounces / around the walls of the hall”), and Mina chronicles its effects on her family with a heavy heart. “I am an American, I scream / in my head, but my mouth is stuffed / with rocks; my body is a stone, like the statue / of a little Buddha Grandpa prays to.” When Roosevelt decrees that West Coast Japanese-Americans are to be imprisoned in inland camps, the Tagawas board up their house, leaving the cat, Grandpa’s roses and Mina’s best friend behind. Following the Tagawas from Washington’s Puyallup Assembly Center to Idaho’s Minidoka Relocation Center (near the titular town of Eden), the narrative continues in poems and letters. In them, injustices such as endless camp lines sit alongside even larger ones, such as the government’s asking interned young men, including Mina’s brother, to fight for America.

An engaging novel-in-poems that imagines one earnest, impassioned teenage girl’s experience of the Japanese-American internment. (historical note) (Verse/historical fiction. 11-14)

Pub Date: March 1, 2014

ISBN: 978-0-8075-1739-0

Page Count: 128

Publisher: Whitman

Review Posted Online: Jan. 28, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014

Categories:

CHILDREN'S FAMILY | CHILDREN'S HISTORICAL FICTION

bookshelf

INTO THE FIRE

From the Westfallen series , Vol. 2

by Ann Brashares & Ben Brashares ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 2025

Fast-moving but let down by questionable omissions.

bookshelf

The efforts of six New Jersey kids to prevent the Nazis from winning World War II continue in this sequel to Westfallen (2024).

In 1944, Alice, Lawrence, and Artie struggle to correct their catastrophic error that, as Alice repeatedly has it, “DESTROYED THE FUTURE.” In 2023, Frances and Henry desperately research the changed history that finds the U.S. transformed into the Nazi-controlled tributary state of Westfallen. Jewish Lukas is largely confined, unable to help them or reach the magic shed that houses the radio that allows the kids to communicate across time, putting him at risk of losing his memories. Meanwhile, in 1944, Lawrence collects scrap metal alongside a kid who grows up to be a patient in the Home for Incurables, where Henry works in 2023. Could that kid hold the key to restoring the timeline? In this volume, Lawrence and Frances join Alice and Henry as first-person narrators, depriving Lukas and Artie of narrative agency. This lack is particularly distressing in Lukas’ case, as his isolation is affecting his personality. It falls to Henry and Alice to prod him into action—which is unfortunate for a novel that never names the Holocaust and omits persecution of the Jews from Alice’s father’s explanation of Nazi ideology (although antisemitism is an obvious feature of life in this alternate timeline). The crackling pace can’t obscure these lapses. Alice, Artie, and Frances are white, Lawrence is Black, and biracial Henry is Black and white.

Fast-moving but let down by questionable omissions. (Science fiction/thriller. 10-13)