Telling her story in first person, Jeanne the writer, in collaboration with her husband James, presents an uncluttered reminiscence of World War II. Unlike young Caucasian children of the era, Jeanne the character joins thousands of Japanese-American youngsters in confronting the difficulties of growing up during worldwide hostilities. The siege mentality creates a bond among an easily identified non-Caucasian people who suffer silent banishment, far from population centers on the ragged edge of California's wasteland. Out of the range of neighborhood prejudice, they enjoy a safe bondage made bearable by the unity of fellow Japanese Americans. The fact that decades pass before judicial authorities acknowledge the wrong done to a maligned, ostracized racial group indicates how isolated and forgotten the internees were during an era weighted down with fear, sacrifice, insecurity, and loss.
To achieve an unbiased reportage, the authors rely on a variety of rhetorical methods: much of the book is simple chronology, a month-by-month narration of events, some traumatic, but most — like swing music, baton twirling, and Sears, Roebuck catalogs — idiosyncratic to the children who lived their formative years in the 1940s. Enhancing that time frame is Jeanne's foreword and an introductory time line, which sets the plot in a historical framework beginning with the first Japanese settlers arriving in Sacramento, California, in 1869, and concluding with Public Law 414 in 1952, an event which granted "Japanese aliens the right to become naturalized U.S. citizens." Abbreviated and abstracted from human emotions, the list of dates and events merely prefaces the struggle of a people to create a home among North American whites.
