Displacement
Author Hughes is the main character of this absorbing graphic novel with elements of time travel fantasy when teenage Kiku is “displaced” from her contemporary 21st-century life and imprisoned with other Japanese Americans, including her maternal grandmother, Ernestina, during World War II. Bircacial (Japanese/white) Kiku is frustrated by how little she knows or has learned about the imprisonment of Japanese Americans; it has been glossed over in her education and there is a silence surrounding it in her family. The chance to get to know Ernestina, who died before she was born, is a bright spot, but even though they live next door, on the other side of a thin wall, her grandmother’s family remains an enigma since they only speak Japanese, a language Kiku doesn’t know, for reasons she suspects are connected to cultural silence around internment. Still, Kiku observes them closely while making other friends, including a young woman with whom she has a budding romance. Kiku doesn’t know when she will find herself transported back to the 21st-century, a device that masterfully echoes the experience among those imprisoned by and at the mercy of the U.S. government in a work that gives a strong sense of life under imprisonment while drawing a connection between what happened then and attitudes toward immigration now. Here, that plays out in the contemporary story as the “displacements,” which Kiku learned her mother experiences too, inspire the two to get politically involved. ©2021 Cooperative Children’s Book Center
Illustrated by Kiku Hughes
CCBC Age Recommendation: Age 12 and older
Age Range:
Grades 6-8 (Ages 11-13)
Grades 9-12 (Age 14 and older)
Format:
Graphic Novel
Subjects:
20th Century
Civil Rights
Fantasy
Friendship
Grandmothers
Identity
Japanese and Japanese Americans
Lesbians
LGBTQ+ Persons
Mothers
Racism
Time Travel
U.S. History
World War II
Diversity subject:
Asian
LGBTQ Character/Topic
Publishers:
First Second, Roaring Brook
Publish Year: 2020
Pages: 274
ISBN: 9781250193537
CCBC Location: Non-Fiction, 741.5 Hughes