This book takes the story of the opera Madam Butterfly as a starting point and tells a story from there using the same main characters. It is set in an interesting time period in history - the years leading up to the second world war. Joey the young child of Lieutenant Pinkerton and the Japanese girl Cho Cho is taken to live in America by PInkerton and his fiancee and brought up there. He does not look Japanese at all with his blond hair but when the second World War comes someone tells and he is sent along with the other Japanese to an internment camp where for the first time he is surrounded by other Japanese speaking, a language he does not know or understandl. Imagine it. To the American people who do not know him he looks like one of them and has been brought up as one of them. The Japanese themselves are at first suspicious of him for he looks different and knows nothing of their language and culture. But the internment cmap proves to be a learning experience for him where he makes up for what he does not know. (Spoiler ahead) In a twist different from the opera Joey learns that he was lied to, that his mother did not in fact succeed in killing herself and is still alive and good friends with Suzuki who is amrried to his mother's brother. Joey is eventually able to leave the internment camp if he goes to fight in a Japanese unit, in Europe. When the war is over you know that he will want to go to Japan to try and track down his mother and get to know and understand the place where he was born, that he cannot remember. He is able to track Suzuki down and learn more of his mothers's life from her but is unfortunately too late to meet his mother who was killed when the bomb was dropped on Nagaski. This was a good story and a very enjoyable read. I could certainly feel something of what Joey must have felt growing up torn between the two cultures, and how hard it must have been for him being lied to by the only mother he knew, when she kept from him the fact that his own mother was still alve. ( )