The ability for humans to adapt and create a “normal” daily routine in extraordinary circumstances is amazing.
Most of it takes place in the Poston Camp. Setting/Theme – The setting is an important part of the story. Her questions become our questions as we experience the war and life in the camp through her. His experiences – and those of the tens of thousands of other Japanese and Japanese Americans – compelled her to write Weedflower.Ĭharacater – The main character, Sumiko, is compelling and well rounded. Weedflower is the story of the rewards and challenges of a friendship across the racial divide, as well as the based-on-real-life story of how the meeting of Japanese Americans and Native Americans changed the future of both.Īuthor’s perspective: (from the book jacket)Ĭynthia Kadohata’s father was held in the Poston internment camp during World War II.
With searing insight and clarity, Newbery Medal-winning author Cynthia Kadohata explores an important and painful topic through the eyes of a young girl who yearns to belong. But then she meets a young Mohave boy who might just become her first real friend…if he can ever stop being angry about the fact that the internment camp is on his tribe’s land. Sumiko soon discovers that the camp is on an Indian reservation and that the Japanese are as unwanted there as they’d been at home. The vivid color of her previous life is gone forever, and now dust storms regularly choke the sky and seep into every crack of the military barrack that is her new “home.” Other Americans start to suspect that all Japanese people are spies for the emperor, even if, like Sumiko, they were born in the United States! As suspicions grow, Sumiko and her family find themselves being shipped to an internment camp in one of the hottest deserts in the United States. That all changes after the horrific events of Pearl Harbor. Even when the other kids tease her, she always has had her flowers and family to go home to. Raised on a flower farm in California, Sumiko is used to being the only Japanese girl in her class. Twelve-year-old Sumiko feels her life has been made up of two parts: before Pearl Harbor and after it.
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