Joy Kogawa

Naomi is navigating her singledom in 1970s small-town Alberta when a family tragedy brings her closer to a past she's tried to forget. This leads her to reflecting back on her childhood experiences leading up to and inside of an internment camp for Japanese Canadians during World War II. As a child she could not know of the nuance or understand everything that was happening. She saw the tragedy on a different level: the rapid and eventually complete unravelling of safety, security and family. Some readers don't like the child's perspective in this novel, but in that alternative version we would be told how it was the children who would suffer most. This is the story of one suffering child. Now that she is revisiting her memories through adult eyes, with all the relevant documentation before her, new interpretations spring to light and the full story of forced internments and migrations emerges with its impacts on both the young and the old who were made its victims.

The writing style was sometimes an irritant for me, but the content is strong and the message is important. Surrendering to racist fear cost our country valuable unison in wartime, and the wrongs that were inflicted on this segment of our population weakened the moral ground from which our country fought World War II. There was clearly a hypocricy to fighting in freedom's name while we were stealing it away in our own backyard. It does not cancel out the heroism of our veterans or make wrong what we did right, but this story reminds how Canada's leaders and its people - how any people - can be fallible and wrong-headed when they let fear guide them.… (meer)

The novelized form of the author's grandmother's time spent in a Canadian Japanese internment camp. I found the book to be superficial. (Maybe it was supposed to be as Obasan was 5 years old when sent to the camp) Although a novel, I found several glaring statements about the U.S. internment(s) that had no basis in fact: 1) the US did not confiscate Japanese citizen's property (which they did) 2) "at least the US Japanese citizens had the Bill of Rights--correct, the had constitutional protection; little good it did them, though. I guess I found it a "light" book for such a serious subject. Maybe it was written for high-schoolers or YA???? Or the young girl experienced it at 5 years of age??? 320 pages… (meer)