A well-plotted and engaging historical novel.
Kamada’s debut novel chronicles the Miyota family’s imprisonment at two West Coast internment camps in the 1940s.
Ten-year-old Fumio Miyota and his family reside on a multigenerational farm in Bainbridge Island, Washington, where his life is comfortable and revolves around chores, school, and hours with his loyal dog, Flyer, and best friend, Zachary. However, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, authorities invade the Japanese American family’s home and take some of the family’s cultural relics and belongings. Later, the family is sent to the Owens Valley Reception Center at Camp Manzanar in Lone Pine, California, and later imprisoned at Idaho’s Camp Minidoka. However, this book not only stresses the bigotry, injustice, and harsh treatment that the family experiences; it also expertly integrates the ways in which Fumio and his family find community in heartbreaking circumstances, including moments in which Fumio is able to thrive. The novel is organized into three parts by locale—Bainbridge Island; Lone Pine; and Hunt, Idaho—and offers an authentic account of the U.S. government’s horrific treatment of Japanese American people during the World War II era. It skillfully allows readers to grasp how Fumio, his family, and his community seek emotional and spiritual survival; some people use art, photography, and taiko drumming to capture time and find freedom and solace. The book’s varying perspectives are unusual, presenting both Fumio’s close third-person point of view and Flyer’s first-person perspective; the latter seems designed to engage younger readers. The author also weaves in an omniscient perspective to ground readers in the family’s home community. The book can feel long-winded at times, but it will likely endear young readers to its characters and their struggles.
A well-plotted and engaging historical novel.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-68513-097-8
Page Count: 355
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A ghost story, a love story, a mystery—this seductive novel has it all.
A haunted house full of haunted people is the setting for this lively, moving tale.
When 15-year-old Sana Malek and her widowed father move from Johannesburg, South Africa, to Durban in 2014, they land in a once-glorious mansion overlooking the sea, now a ramshackle rooming house presided over by a kindly old man called Doctor. Sana is familiar with ghosts, having been haunted all her life by the spiteful ghost of her previously conjoined twin sister, who died soon after they were separated. So she recognizes that the house teems with them. She forms tentative bonds with some of the place’s corporeal residents, a group of contentious older women. But she’s more interested in the departed, and she begins to unravel their stories, especially when she finds a long-locked bedroom with diaries and photos that are evidence of a couple in love. In 1919, we learn in the book’s second timeline, a dashing, wealthy young Muslim man named Akbar Ali Khan left his village in Gujarat. Eventually he settled in Durban, following an arranged marriage in India with his modern Anglophile wife, Jahanara Begum. They have a son and daughter, but their marriage never warms, despite the spectacular house and gardens he builds for them. Then he does fall in love, with a Tamil girl hired to work in his sugar factory. Meena rejects him, but he takes her as another wife anyway, patiently winning her over until their love catches fire. Akbar isn’t the only one in love with Meena; the djinn of the title, an ancient creature weary of the world, is enchanted. But Jahanara’s bitter jealousy of Meena will lead them all to a terrible fate. Almost a century later, Sana will put it all together—but will that bring catastrophe? Khan’s prose is lush and lovely, her pacing skillful, and she successfully weaves a complex plot with a large cast.
A ghost story, a love story, a mystery—this seductive novel has it all.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2024
ISBN: 9780593653456
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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