You are no longer a citizen. You are considered a prisoner of war and are taken from your home, put behind barbed wire and into tiny barracks with your entire family. You leave behind your friends, your school, …your life. While your life is paused everything else around you goes on like normal. It happened here. Internment camps in America during World War II are a blotch upon the pages of American history… something we would rather forget. However, it did happen and this is the story of two girls and how their worlds collided in one of these camps.
It’s 1944, and World War II is raging across Europe and the Pacific. The war seemed far away from Margot in Iowa and Haruko in Colorado–until they were uprooted to dusty Texas, all because of the places their parents once called home: Germany and Japan.
Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Haruko and Margot meet at the high school in Crystal City, a “family internment camp” for those accused of colluding with the enemy. The teens discover that they are polar opposites in so many ways, except for one that seems to override all the others: the camp is changing them, day by day and piece by piece. Haruko finds herself consumed by fear for her soldier brother and distrust of her father, who she knows is keeping something from her. And Margot is doing everything she can to keep her family whole as her mother’s health deteriorates and her rational, patriotic father becomes a man who distrusts America and fraternizes with Nazis.
With everything around them falling apart, Margot and Haruko find solace in their growing, secret friendship. But in a prison the government has deemed full of spies, can they trust anyone–even each other?
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