Weedflower

Description

"This is what it felt like to be lonely: 1. Like everyone was looking at you. Sumiko felt this once in a while. 2. Like nobody was looking at you. Sumiko felt this a lot. 3. Like you didn't care about anything at all. She felt this maybe once a week. 4. Like you were just about to cry over every little thing. She felt this about once daily." Raised on a flower farm in California, twelve-year-old Sumiko is often isolated at school, where she is the only Japanese-American girl in her class. But at least she has her flowers and her family to go home to. Until Pearl Harbor is bombed by the Japanese. Then, 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. Soon Sumiko's family is shipped to an internment camp on an Indian reservation, where the Japanese are as unwanted as they'd been at home. But then Sumiko 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 camp is on his tribe's land.
WEEDFLOWER is the story of the rewards and challenges of a friendship across the racial divide, told with searing insight through the eyes of a young girl who yearns to belong.

Author description

Cynthia Kadohata is the author of the Newbery Medal-winning book Kira-Kira, the National Book Award winner The Thing About Luck, the Jane Addams Peace Award and Pen USA Award winner Weedflower, Cracker!, Outside Beauty, A Million Shades of Gray, and several critically acclaimed adult novels, including The Floating World. She lives with her son and dog in West Covina, California.