We Are Not Free: A Printz Honor Winner

If this book is a 2021 Michael L. Printz Award honor book, I can’t wait to read the book that won! In the first sentence of the book, the reader is introduced to the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the prejudice the Japanese Americans were forced to bear because of that bombing.The story centers around 14 teens and their families who lived in San Francisco during the years of 1942 to 1945. Chee’s characters, drawn from her own family history, are vibrant and full of depth. The hurt and pain they endured is deeply felt by each of them as well as the reader. Yet, despite the pain, there is love, humor, laughter, and fear between these pages as they face the hand they were dealt.The Japanese community in San Francisco was rounded up and forced to leave their homes, business, belongings, and family treasures behind. They were relocated and incarcerated in makeshift camps in the desert in Utah. The first camp deposited the families in an empty, dirty stable where, if a a family was lucky, they might get two horse stalls to to call home. The smell of manure was strong.From beginning to end the dialogue is authentic and and believable as the characters tell their stories of how this brutality affected parents, siblings, friends, and their own hopes and dreams. Even with the lack of jobs, food, school, and opportunities that these teens and their families faced day after day, they found laughter and love and a way to live through the pain as they tried to understand why they were treated so harshly by the country most of them loved.They were robbed of their livelihood and their homes yet they found fun in outlandish ways. They started fights and finished them. They loved and teased their friends and siblings and even went to fight for the same country that put them in a desert prison. All the time keeping a strong hold on each other. They all grieved and eventually, most found a way to heal.We Are Not Free is a must read for all. Prejudice and hate is hard to understand and it is oh so hard to comprehend what these families went through. Be sure and read the author’s extensive notes.I am recommending this award winning book to all my friends. Somehow, in 2020, I missed this jewel of a book. A solid five star read for me!

My grandparents, parents, all my aunts and uncles,every single person of Japanese ancestry I knew until I got to college went through the US concentration camps. I thought it was a kind of demented rite of passage when I was a child. However, none of them would really talk about it. Their attitude was it was another humiliating, shameful, ugly phase of their lives best walked away from as fast as possible, forgotten if possible. Mom would tell us little anecdotes about her camp life, she was in her mid teens when they were forced into the camp, just very short things that happened, always funny. Like there was a ditch that ran close to their barrack that you had to walk over to get to other places but that ditch was dirty and often filled with run off "water" from the backed up toilet outhouse or something--you didn't want to be in the ditch ever. The inmates put a plank over the ditch to be able to walk over to the other side and the boys would always try to bang and move the plank when girls walked over just so they'd fall in the ditch. Funny brief things like that. I attended a few of the hearings held, heard some of the memories a few of the braver people spoke about, and since then I've wondered a great deal about how it must have felt going through all that my people went through--and to some degree still are going through. This book let's you see how life probably was for teenage kids. There was a lot of racism before WWII, has always been racism in the USA towards non-whites--people forget that racism is not a recent thing, generations have lived in the USA knowing only racism towards them. It takes you through the removal orders, the heart break of people giving up sentimental things because they just could not be packed into the limited luggage they could carry; people being robbed by mostly whites who took advantage of the people's need to "get rid" of cars, furniture, applicances, antiques, things of great value for a pittance. Takes you through what is must have felt like to have to leave your home because the gov't declared you have to leave, to move to horse stalls and other less-than-human places because the relocating of hundreds of thousands of people was all so last minute, haphazard and insufficiently planned for, Then not knowing where they were taking you via bus/train, finding yourself in some god forsakes dusty, treeless, barren place and having to live with a whole lot of strangers. All of this knowing you and yours had done NOTHING bad, nothing wrong. Her characters cover the love-hate of America--your country that you have always loved and thought of as home is doing this to you without a trial, without any logical reason. She covers the loss of the family unit lead by the father who no one contradicted up until the camps. Covers that frail relationship between boys and girls as they pass through puberty into adolescence. And she even covers the forced "leaving camp" too, how terrifying it was to know you'd go back to even more racism if you returned to your West Coast home, but do you completely reset your life in some more easterly place where you know no one, where even the weather is unfamiliar? She covers the sacrifices of the 442nd. And I cried; not wailed but could not stop the tears from leaking out because of what these young men went through just to prove they were good Americans, just to bring a little honor to their families and people, only to come home to concentrations camps and then hate outside the camps. This is what I have been looking for in my reading about my people. The average, every day life of what it must have been like. My mom is 95 now and really tired of all the hate and having to struggle just to live a life in America simply because she still looks non-white. My family has been living in America for over 100 years now and I still get that "go back to China" crap, still get that "my, you talk English so well!" (And, sic, btw.) This book ought to be mandatory reading in all USA high schools--we don't need Candide and Hamlet and Macbeth, sorry but none of those books have ANYTHING to do with life in America and are too distant to be relatable. This book should be read.

This is another one of those folks that should be required reading for every high school student. For that matter the majority of adults need to read it too because I had no idea of the extent to which people were harmed during this time period. I knew the Japanese people were sent to internment camps, but there has been so little information about this in any history books, movies, or social awareness. It was difficult to read about the conditions in the camps and the way people were treated. It was difficult to read about how sad these teenagers were. It was difficult to read about the loss of an entire generation’s culture. At the end, the author talks about the examples we are seeing in today’s life that show that many of these issues of “otherness” and people of color have still not been resolved.This is considered a young adult book, but it also needs to be read by adults whose education in this area was as deficient as mine.

A story of the Japanese internment camps during WWII told through the eyes of several Japanese teens. Each chapter is one of the teens talking about their daily lives. The story goes from the start of the war till near the end. The author does a wonderful job with characters. I felt invested in all of them. I laughed with them and cried with them. People need to keep writing these stories so that we may learn from our mistakes in how we treat each other.

I am so grateful to Traci Chee for this book. I have a much deeper appreciation for this part of American history and the tragedy it was. I now have some insight into the courage, the sorrow, the loss, and the resilience of the Japanese-Americans of this era. This book should be on school shelves around the country.

This is a book that I can't wait to re-read! Fourteen different viewpoints may seem like a lot but they were woven together so well and there were only a couple of times when I had to look back at the list of characters at the beginning of the book which was so helpful and definitely a good call to include. I think that having that many different characters helped to really flesh out this specific event in WW2 as it is definitely one that isn't written about enough. I had never read anything about this aspect of the war or even heard much about it past the fact that it happened and what I discovered from reading this book was really shocking! The author does a great job of making this history accessible and engaging for anyone which I love.Each one of the character's stories were so unique and yet it was crazy to think about the thousands of stories still left untold from that time. Every one of the teens came alive so vividly in my head and I found them all so relatable. Their everyday teenage emotions were balanced so perfectly with the confusion and fear that the incarceration ensued and when I was reading it felt like there was no barrier between me and the past and that I was living right there along with them. I loved how each of the chapters bled into the other and when you reached the end of one the person that I most wanted to hear from was the one heading the next chapter.I think that Shig and Twitchy's chapters were my favorite. Their friendship with each other as well as their relationships with the other characters were so genuine and I was left wishing for them as the older brothers I never had. The girls' chapters were also special as it was easier for me to put myself in their shoes and experience the story first-hand. The one character that didn't really fit for me was Kiyoshi. I did enjoy his chapter but I don't think it would have made a huge difference had he been left out. Overall this is another historical favorite for me and one that I would definitely recommend to anyone, not just lovers of the historical genre. Happy Reading :)

フィクションだけど、実在する人たちをベースにしているとのことなので、まるでその人たちの日記を読んでいるような感じ。各人物に個性があり、昔、友人だった日系2世、3世の仲間たちを思い浮かべなから、彼は彼に似ているなと考えたりして、楽しく読めた。とはいえ、本質的には非常に悲しい話。最後はまさかの結末。でも読み進まずにはいられない。非常に良い作品。