THE BRACELET

Emi, a young Japanese-American whose family leaves Berkeley to be interned at the beginning of WW II, receives a bracelet as a parting gift from her best friend, but it's lost on the first day at the camp. Emi is desolate, but soon realizes she won't need a keepsake to remember her friend—the memories that fill her heart will always be with her. This account of injustice and dislocation- -based on the author's own experiences and previously published as a short story—achieves its wrenching effect by the accumulation of details: a beloved garden left untended, matching registration tags attached to family members and their belongings, the squalid ``apartment'' in a horse stall at an abandoned racetrack. Readers can find the autobiographical roots of this story in The Invisible Thread (1991), along with many other examples of the courage and determination that enabled Uchida's family, like Emi's, to survive imprisonment with values and spirit intact. The carefully researched watercolors, with their irregular edges, are like old pictures ripped from an album. (Picture book. 6-9)