Goodreads synopsis: Evalina Cassano’s life in an Italian-American family in 1941 is quiet and ordinary … until she falls in love with Taichi Hamasaki, the son of Japanese immigrants. Despite the scandal it would cause and the fact that interracial marriage is illegal in California, Evalina and Taichi vow they will find a way to be together. But anti-Japanese feelings erupt across the country after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and Taichi and his family are forced to give up their farm and are incarcerated in a Japanese internment camp.
Degrading treatment at Manzanar Relocation Center is so difficult, Taichi doubts he will ever leave the camp alive. Treasured letters from Evalina are his sole connection to the outside world. Embracing the boldest action she can to help Taichi, Evalina begins to radically speak out at school and at home, shining a light on this dark and shameful racial injustice.
With their future together on the line, Evalina and Taichi can only hold true to their values and believe in their love against all odds to have any hope of making it back to one another.
My rating: 3 stars.
Content warnings: PG. Some kissing, mentions of an illegitimate child, some bloodless shooting, racism, forced poor living conditions.
(spoilers below)
Thoughts: I really wish this book had only been Taichi's POV. I think that would have done a lot to fix many of the gripes I had with the book. Evalina's chapters feel kind of pointless. I think I get what the author was going for in writing her side too, but unfortunately it didn't come across very well.
Even though Taichi was literally in a internment camp, the stakes didn't really start feeling real until a couple chapters before the end. And then once things were finally starting to happen, they were over again. The complete skipping over most of Taichi's time in Manzanar felt like cheating and didn't help me feel like anything bad was actually going to happen to anyone. The one person who did die didn't even resonate with me because I couldn't remember who he was or what impact he had on Taichi's life.
There were a lot of things like that. Elements of the story that seemed like they should have had a bigger impact on the story than they actually did. Reading it felt rushed, like the author just wanted to summarize the bad things so she could happily reunite the characters again with a cursory mention of what they had been through because it was the premise of the book.
That being said, most of the chapters that do focus on Taichi and the camp were well done. And an important part of American history I don't think we should lose sight of. Germany wasn't the only place keeping its own people in camps where many died, just because of the color of their skin. I know the arguments for why the US was right in what they did, but it doesn't change what happened. Or how many people it hurt while trying to protect others.
The story really did have a lot of potential. But it seemed to be treated a little too lightly for the subject of the story itself, and that's where the main problems came in. It didn't give time for the weight of the story. Making it longer and focusing on what was going on around the characters more could have helped put the entire struggle in more perspective. Made it seem more heartbreaking and real. I didn't even have a problem with the idea of the romance, and that being a major conflict. Unfortunately that felt like the only conflict, which minimized everything else going on around the characters, as well as what their families and friends were suffering too.
It was a great idea of a story. The execution just fell shorter than I would have liked.
(As a side note, if you're looking for other stories about Japanese internment camps, Weedflower by Cynthia Kadohata is worth checking out. It's a middle grade book, but it takes the camps seriously and shows their realty in a deep, age appropriate manner.)
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