The War Outside
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From the bestselling and award-winning author of Girl in the Blue Coat, comes an extraordinary novel of conviction, friendship, and betrayal, when two teenage girls meet in an American internment camp during WWII.
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.
Margot and Haruko 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, Haruko and Margot 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?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In 1944, 17-year-old Japanese-American Haruko, from Colorado, and German-American Margot, from Iowa, are imprisoned with their families in a Department of Justice run internment camp for "enemy aliens" suspected by the U.S. government of being spies. (The camp differs from WWII War Relocation Authority run camps to which West Coast Japanese residents were relocated en masse, an author's note explains.) Although the two groups in the Texas camp rarely mix, the young women are immediately drawn to each other. Both are experiencing family problems: Haruko worries about her brother, who is serving in the U.S. Army's Japanese division, and wonders what her father had to do with her family's relocation; Margot's father finds himself courted by Nazi idealists as their situation worsens, and her pregnant mother fears yet another miscarriage. Camp life, with its daily indignities and occasional tragedies, grows tense, and the two girls find their friendship intensifying. Hesse (The Girl in the Blue Coat) draws Margot and Haruko realistically and sympathetically, bolstered by research into WWII internment camps, in a moving book that successfully describes an unjust aspect of U.S. history. Ages 12 up.
