A Place to Belong

Parents need to know that Cynthia Kadohata's A Place to Belong is an emotional historical novel about 12-year-old Japanese American Hanako and her family, who emigrate to Hiroshima after being imprisoned in an internment camp in the United States during World War II. The book is dedicated to Wayne Collins, an American civil rights attorney who helped Japanese American citizens reclaim their American citizenship after the war. Readers will learn about Pearl Harbor and the Japanese internment camps, the Dust Bowl, Hiroshima and the atomic bomb, and the ACLU. The book is also a good introduction to Japanese culture, values, and words such as "nikkei," which refers to someone of Japanese descent, and "kintsukuroi," which is the Japanese tradition of fixing broken pottery with gold lacquer. A character mentions that she's had a gun pointed at her and often thinks about the effects of the atomic bomb. Another character explains what he saw after the atomic bomb was dropped. The characters are often worried about having enough food to avoid starvation and trade butter and cigarettes on the black market in exchange for rice.