Weekend Picks for April 25th

Katie Sluiter

Our Weekend Picks for April concludes with one final contribution from Dr. Katie Sluiter. This week she writes about a historical YA novel set in Japantown, San Fransisco. ​Our many thanks to Dr. Sluiter for centering so many wonderful historical fictions YA novels in her recommendations this month, and for her ongoing work in Holocaust education.
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Katie Sluiter has been teaching ELA for over 20 years in West Michigan where she lives with her family and her English bulldog. She has her PhD in English Education and currently teaches 8th grade ELA near Grand Rapids, MI.

We Are Not Free by Traci Chee

Several of my 8th graders this year share my love of historical fiction. We study the Holocaust during first semester, and many ask for more books about the atrocity. Others latch on to a particular author; there is an entire faction of students, for example, who have been passing all my Alan Gratz titles around this year. 

Then there are those students who want to read historical fiction that takes place in the United States. Several have read Don Brown’s graphic novels Drowned City: Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans and The Great American Dust Bowl. George Takei’s graphic novel memoir They Called Us Enemy is another popular choice.

I, too, have read all of these and it was Takei’s memoir that sparked my interest in a part of U.S. history that I knew very little about: The Japanese on the west coast and the internment during World War II. Last year, one of my honors students had read We Are Not Free by Traci Chee and recommended it to me, so I picked it up this year as my spring break read.​

The novel begins in Japantown, San Francisco right after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Each chapter is from the point of view of one of 14 second generation Japanese American teenagers who have all grown up together and have formed a tight connection as a chosen family. Collectively they are removed from their community and sent to an internment camp. Each teen handles their new reality differently while racism and injustice push some of them  into a different, worse camp while carrying others to serve the country that hates them.

While I found myself flipping to the character list at the beginning of the book to remember who was related to whom, I found the different perspectives to be a powerful way to give the reader multiple experiences of the same tragedy. Traci Chee writes that she based many of the characters on family and ancestors of her own who told versions of many of the narratives she includes in the novel. ​

While I was immersed in the Japanese internment camps in the 1940’s, one of my students was learning about what happened at the Alamo through A Line in the Sand: The Alamo Diary of  Lucinda Lawrence, a book from the Dear America Scholastic series. “The book is about a girl living in Texas in the 1800s during the conflict between Texas and Mexico. The book is written in the style of a diary, and the main character writes in her diary about what happens everyday,” my student writes.

I had forgotten all about this series (which was published in the 1990’s) until this student told me she found them at our local library. As a former English Language Learner (home language being Swahili), she found them when she was younger and loved reading them to practice English and learn about the United States.

Traci Chee

When asked why she likes this particular book, she said, “I really like this book because it is historical fiction which is probably my favorite book genre. Another reason why I like this book is because it is written in the style of a diary and I love books like that. People should read this book because it's really nice and it talks a lot about real events that happened in history.”