about the book
Aki Munemitsu’s life is torn apart. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, she and her family are forced to leave their asparagus farm in southern California, and are relocated to a Japanese internment camp in Poston, Arizona.
For years, they are imprisoned in flimsy barracks that keep out neither the summer heat nor the winter chill, and their life is brutally stark. Perhaps what Aki longs for most is her beloved Japanese doll she left hidden in her old room.
Sylvia Mendez’s life has been torn apart too. Living in the Munemitsu’s house, she expected to go to the excellent local school. Instead the officials deny her entrance, saying she must attend the inferior Mexican school much farther away. In her new room, she finds Aki’s doll and wonders about the girl that once played with it.
This is a fictionalized account of the events surrounding the Mendez vs. Westminster court case that became a landmark decision leading to school segregation. We sit in the court room and hear the harsh bigoted explanations from school officials and learn the reasoning behind the court’s decisions. In alternating chapters, we follow Aki and Sylvia as both girls deal with family issues, isolation, questions of self-worth, and their own identities as Americans.
In the end, our nation is changed forever. Will the two girls who helped bring about that change ever meet?
about the author
Winifred Conkling is a very interesting person. She worked with Mother Teresa in Calcutta, taught reading to maximum-security prisoners, lived in a dung-hut with Kenyon Samburu warriors, and ran the original Olympic marathon to Athens, Greece. What she likes the most, though, is writing books for children. She has also written more than thirty nonfiction books for adults.
Although a few acquaintances might say she never really grew up, she did spend her childhood in Maryland, Florida, and Indiana.
She started writing stories in elementary school, and in college she studied journalism, later working as a writer and editor for a number of newspapers and magazines.
Though Winifred found it hard to make up good fictional stories, she still wanted to write for children, so she went to Vermont College and earned a Master’s in Writing for Children and Young Adults. She learned a lot of things there, but it didn’t make it any easier to come up with good stories. Though it is still hard, she loves the struggle!
Winifred now lives in Northern Virginia with her husband, three daughters, a dog, two rats, a horse, and all the squirrels and chipmunks that inhabit her back yard!
Source:
Author website
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