We hope your mid-summer reading list is as hot as the weather, and if you're looking for another great YA novel to read, Audra Slocum has you covered with her Weekend Pick: the 2020 National Book Award Finalist for Young People’s Literature We Are Not Free by Traci Chee.
 Audra Slocum | Dr. Audra Slocum is an Associate Professor of Secondary English Education and the Director of Teacher Education at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. Prior to joining OU, she was an associate professor at West Virginia University and co-director of the National Writing Project at WVU for 10 years. She has presented at NCTE, AERA, and WVCTE and published in English Education, Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, and English Teaching: Practice and Critique. Her scholarship primarily focuses on how teenagers from linguistically marginalized communities navigate oppressive norms in secondary English classrooms. As a teacher educator, she prepares secondary English students to be actively anti-oppressive as they employ core teaching practices. |
We Are Not Free by Traci Chee
Traci Chee’s We Are Not Free is a powerful, heart-wrenching novel that feels alarmingly relevant in today’s political climate. As the U.S. continues to expand detention centers and strip away protections for immigrants, revisiting this story—rooted in the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII—was both illuminating and enraging.
 | The novel follows fourteen Nisei teens—second-generation Japanese Americans—from San Francisco’s Japantown. Over 100,000 Japanese Americans were forced into interment camps, under Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1942s. The majority of those interned were American citizens. The novel brings to life many historical realities, including the No-No Boys, rebellions, the various characters’ voices. Each chapter is voiced by a different character, capturing the forced removal from their homes, the suffocating conditions of internment camps, and the devastating loss of agency and identity. Each character is well developed with a distinct voice, shaped by their specific family dynamics, individual personalities and experiences, and their role within their community of friends. The characters are funny, sarcastic, bold, meek – Some are angry, others try to stay hopeful. |
| As the years unfold, the characters reckon with typical teenage quandaries like navigating parental expectations, falling in love, and following personal passions, all within the context of imprisonment with limited food, inadequate housing, and cruel and inhumane treatment. On top of these complexities, the characters also had to wrestle with how they understood themselves as Japanese and as American, and their relationship with fellow prisoners, the guards, US government, the war, and white residents. Yet she also gives us tenderness, solidarity, and joy, most often within their community of friends. Amongst the friends, they gave and received comfort, motivation to take on daunting challenges, and experienced true acceptance. The teens’ loyalty to one another is the emotional heart of the novel—a reminder that collective care is a radical act. We Are Not Free left me thinking about what freedom, friendship and solidarity means, and how fragile they are. It reminded me that survival isn’t just about endurance—it’s about refusing to let go of our humanity. Chee’s novel is a call to remember, and to resist. |  Traci Chee |
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