Displacement
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4.2 • 15 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A teenager is pulled back in time to witness her grandmother's experiences in World War II-era Japanese internment camps in Displacement, a historical graphic novel from Kiku Hughes.
Kiku is on vacation in San Francisco when suddenly she finds herself displaced to the 1940s Japanese-American internment camp that her late grandmother, Ernestina, was forcibly relocated to during World War II.
These displacements keep occurring until Kiku finds herself "stuck" back in time. Living alongside her young grandmother and other Japanese-American citizens in internment camps, Kiku gets the education she never received in history class. She witnesses the lives of Japanese-Americans who were denied their civil liberties and suffered greatly, but managed to cultivate community and commit acts of resistance in order to survive.
Kiku Hughes weaves a riveting, bittersweet tale that highlights the intergenerational impact and power of memory.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mixing fact and fiction in this autobiographical graphic novel, debut author Hughes follows a teen experiencing Japanese internment firsthand through time travel to the WWII era. Japanese American Kiku Hughes, 16, feels disconnected from her Japanese heritage, and she knows little about her family's history, which includes internment in Utah's Topaz Relocation Center. On a trip to San Francisco with her mother, an ephemeral fog transports Kiku from the site of her maternal grandmother's childhood home to the past. Later, pulled from her Seattle home during the Trump Muslim ban, Kiku spends more than a year interned as a Japanese prisoner alongside her then-living maternal grandmother. She struggles over whether to introduce herself and manages to cope with the help of fellow prisoners Aiko Mifune and love-interest May Ide. Through Kiku, readers learn key details about this moment in history, among them the murder of James Wakasa and the further relocation of people who voted, in a loyalty questionnaire, against serving in the U.S. military and renouncing their ancestry. Art features straightforward linework with full-color, often spare backgrounds that focus on characters. Though Kiku doesn't exert her will on the past, Hughes centers that powerlessness to create a compelling story about an oft-overlooked period of U.S. aggression against its own citizens. Ages 12 up.
