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Summary
Summary
Here it is! The hugely anticipated follow-up to Gratz's NYT bestselling, critically acclaimed phenomenon REFUGEE. This is another searing and heart-pounding look at kids making their way through war. A New York Times bestseller! It's 1945, and the world is in the grip of war.Hideki lives on the island of Okinawa, near Japan. When WWII crashes onto his shores, Hideki is drafted into the Blood and Iron Student Corps to fight for the Japanese army. He is handed a grenade and a set of instructions: Don't come back until you've killed an American soldier.Ray, a young American Marine, has just landed on Okinawa. He doesn't know what to expect -- or if he'll make it out alive. He just knows that the enemy is everywhere.Hideki and Ray each fight their way across the island, surviving heart-pounding ambushes and dangerous traps. But when the two of them collide in the middle of the battle, the choices they make in that instant will change everything.From the acclaimed author of Refugee comes this high-octane story of how fear can tear us apart, and how hope can tie us back together.
Author Notes
Alan Gratz is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of several highly acclaimed books for young readers, including Ground Zero , Allies , Grenade, Refugee , Projekt 1065 , Prisoner B-3087 , and Code of Honor . Alan lives in North Carolina with his wife and daughter. Look for him online at alangratz.com.
Reviews (1)
New York Review of Books Review
IN THE PAST FEW YEARS, children's literature has become more committed to diversity, and lately we're seeing more "Own Voices" books, whose authors share their protagonists' marginalized identity. The best of this season's historical fiction demonstrates why all kinds of diversity are important, with writers from varied backgrounds using settings we've seen before - a Native American boarding school, a World War II internment camp in Texas, Okinawa, Chicago during the Great Migration - to tell stories that are nuanced, honest and new. THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT created Indian boarding schools in the late 19 th century to control Native Americans and eradicate their culture. Run on military lines with draconian rules and brutal punishments, they're a stain on our national history - yet some Native American parents, given the complexity of their circumstances, willingly and with full understanding chose to place their own children there. That situation is sensitively dramatized in TWO ROADS (Dial, 320 pp., $16.99; ages io to 14), by the celebrated Abenaki author Joseph Bruchac. In 1932 12-year-old Cal Black and his father live as knights of the road, hobos following an ethical code. Cal's father served honorably in the Great War, but lost the family farm to foreclosure two years ago, just after Cal's mother died. Since then they've ridden the rails in search of better prospects they never find. Cal is often hungry and sometimes scared: Their black hair and tan skin can make him and his father targets in the rural South. But Cal adores his father and is proud of the way they help each other. Then war veterans decide to camp around Washington in pursuit of their wartime bonuses. Cal's father, fearing the situation won't be safe for Cal, drops two bombshells: First, he and Cal are not white. They're Creek Indians. Second, he wants Cal to go to Challagi, the Indian boarding school in Oklahoma that he himself ran away from three times. While the education and the living conditions will be subpar, they're better than what Cal's getting now - and if his father can get his bonus they could go back to having a permanent home. At Challagi, the days of draconian punishments are past, but still far more students run away than graduate. It's not an easy place - but it gives Cal a community, and a tribal identity he didn't realize he was lacking. He joins a band of boys, begins to learn to speak Creek and takes part in stomp dances at night in the woods. Cal's cleareyed first-person narration drives the novel. Meticulously honest, generous, autonomous and true, he sees things for what they are rather than what he'd like them to be. The result is one of Bruchac's best books. Cal comes to see himself as a gentleman of two roads: one he travels with his father, and the other, a Creek road, that he negotiates himself. A detailed afterword explains sources for the story. THE WAR OUTSIDE (Little, Brown, 318 pp., $17.99; ages 12 and up), by Monica Hesse ("The Girl in the Blue Coat"), also takes a setting we think we understand and shifts it in an important way. Seventeen-year-old Haruko is a nisei, an American-born child of Japanese immigrants. In 1944, along with her younger sister and her mother, she travels from Denver to Texas, to join her father in a World War II family internment camp called Crystal City. Unlike the camps where West Coast Japanese-Americans were imprisoned en masse, Crystal City houses enemy aliens suspected of actually spying - and not just Japanese. Germans live in Crystal City, too. On her first day of high school in the camp, Haruko meets Margot, a first-generation GermanAmerican teenager whose family farmed in Iowa. Margot's father attended a Nazi meeting there. Margot hates Hitler but she's not sure what her increasingly unstable father actually believes. Meanwhile Haruko doesn't know why her father was sent to the camp, but she knows he's hiding something from her. Her brother, Ken, is fighting in the United States Army. Has her father somehow endangered him? Crystal City is divided, literally and metaphorically - Japanese on one side of the camp, Germans on the other. Neither side trusts the other; neither side is entirely trustworthy. Because the government considers the families to be prisoners of war, who might be repatriated to their birth countries and complain about their treatment, the facility is reasonably comfortable, with a well-appointed school and a vast community swimming pool. But it's still a prison, and both girls feel changed by their confinement. Haruko and Margot quickly forge an intense, wholly believable, somewhat erotic secret relationship. As the war careens to an end, tensions in the camp lead to violence. One of the girls is forced to betray the other. It's a tightly plotted exploration of the consequences of fear. ALAN GRATZ, the author of the best-selling "Refugee," couldn't write a slow-paced book even if he were paid by the word. In GRENADE (Scholastic, 270 pp., $17.99; ages 9 to 12 ), he takes on the nearly three-month battle of Okinawa through the eyes of two combatants: Ray, a young man on his first tour of duty in the Marines, and Hideki, a 14-year-old schoolboy who is granted early graduation the day the Americans land. He also receives two grenades: one to kill the enemy and one to kill himself. Okinawa had been under Japanese control for over 300 years, but Okinawans never really assimilated, retaining their own language and culture. The higher-ups within the Japanese Army have all removed to the mainland. Those soldiers left on Okinawa are charged with fighting to the last man. Hideki's family lives under the shadow of an ancestor's cowardice, so he's determined to prove himself a hero, until his dying father charges him with finding his sister and staying alive. For a middle school novel this has a high body count. War is relentless; characters we care about die. Gratz is careful not to describe the bloodshed in too much detail, but it still might be a bit much for some readers. The central truth, hard won and believable, is that sometimes it takes greater courage not to fight. Hideki learns to see valor on both sides, to understand that war turns people into monsters, but that after the battle the monsters can become people again. FINDING LANGSTON (Holiday House, 112 pp., $17.99; ages 9 to 13), the first middle grade novel by the picture book writer Lesa Cline-Ransome ("Before She Was Harriet"), takes us into the years just after World War II. When 11-year-old Langston's mother died, his father sold what little they had and moved himself and Langston from Alabama to a black neighborhood in Chicago called Bronzeville. Langston is lonely and grieving. So far none of Chicago's supposed benefits have materialized: His father works long hours but can't afford to replace Langston's worn boots or country overalls. Their apartment is bleak and empty. They seem to have buried all warmth and comfort with Mama. Then, by accident, Langston happens upon the George Cleveland Hall Library. In Alabama, libraries were for whites only. This library, Langston learns, is for any resident of Chicago - and its founder, namesake and head librarian are all black. Langston discovers black writers - among them, a poet with whom he shares a name. Is that an accident? Or did Mama somehow know this poetry? There aren't any explosions in this spare story. Nor is there a happy ending. Instead, Langston discovers something more enduring: solace. To quote Langston Hughes: "My black one / Thou are not beautiful / Yet thou hast / A loveliness / Surpassing beauty." It's a fine epitaph for all of these fine books. KIMBERLY BRUBAKER BRADLEY IS the author of the Newbery Honor-winning "The War That Saved My Life" and its sequel, "The War I Finally Won."