Twelve-year-old Sumiko feels her life has been made up of two parts:
before Pearl Harbor and after it. The good part and the bad part. Raised
on a flower farm in California, Sumiko is used to being the only
Japanese girl in her class. Even when the other kids tease her, she
always has had her flowers and family to go home to.
That all changes after the horrific events of Pearl Harbor. Other
Americans start to suspect that all Japanese people are spies for the
emperor, even if, like Sumiko, they were born in the United States! As
suspicions grow, Sumiko and her family find themselves being shipped to
an internment camp in one of the hottest deserts in the United States.
The vivid color of her previous life is gone forever, and now dust
storms regularly choke the sky and seep into every crack of the military
barrack that is her new "home."
Sumiko soon discovers that the camp is on an Indian reservation and that
the Japanese are as unwanted there as they'd been at home. But then she
meets a young Mohave boy who might just become her first real
friend...if he can ever stop being angry about the fact that the
internment camp is on his tribe's land.
With searing insight and clarity, Newbery Medal-winning author Cynthia
Kadohata explores an important and painful topic through the eyes of a
young girl who yearns to belong. Weedflower is the story of the rewards
and challenges of a friendship across the racial divide, as well as the
based-on-real-life story of how the meeting of Japanese Americans and
Native Americans changed the future of both.
