Most of this book felt like prose broken up to look like poetry. I like that some of the letters and essays were presented as prose. Nick's letters were a nice touch, giving the author the ability to show what was happening outside camp as the war went on. The book reminded me a lot of the show Allegiance.

I enjoyed most of it except when Mina compares the camps to Africa. Nagai could have come up with another comparison that doesn't reinforce the stereotype that Africa is a wholly primitive place.

“The government took away our names, our houses, and most importantly, our dignity.”

I liked the idea that this book was written in verse.  Writing in verse in difficult for some individuals but for others it is easy as the sentence structure is emotional, it flows and its structure can be short or long.   Since this book is narrated by thirteen year-old Mina Tagawa, I liked to think that her emotions were driving her to write and thence, the words flowed out onto the page with true emotion.  Mina’s life would change suddenly as Pearl Harbor and the war became reality.  Mina and her family’s mundane life were shattered.  Being Japanese- American’s they were now being ridiculed and humiliated. Driven from Seattle, the family and other Japanese-American families arrive at a camp which reminds Mina of the concentration camps that Mina read about in school.  You feel the desperation and the confusion that Mina senses as she tries to understand why this is happening. She is an American, why should not be treated?  This is not fair. This is not the American way.  This novel is short but it drives a hard punch at the life of the many Japanese-Americans who were isolated and cast-aside.

Thank you NetGalley for providing me a copy of this book.

I generally don't like prose, I feel like someone just grabbed a good story, grabbed some scissors and went off to snip at random places and paste them like that. It felt unhinged. Still this book was good, since it also had some normal story telling.

This book is about a dark period in the history of the US. After the bombing on Pearl Harbour there was a time where people were suspicion of Japanese people, started to shun them, call them names, restrict them in their ways, and eventually had them "evacuated" to camps, where they had to stay for years.

This is the story of one such Japanese person, a little girl, who doesn't understand why everything is happening, is doing her best at becoming American. She gets put in a camp, and she tells us about her experiences, she writes letters to her best friend (yes, miraculously not everyone was hating on Japanese people), and later also writes and gets letters from her brother. She also writes to her brother. In between that we get a very stunning look on her life during this period. Camps, with barely anything, classes where they are taught about being an American, and how they eventually after years, were freed and how they got home.

I would truly recommend this book to everyone. Read it!

Received this from NetGalley for review.

Synopsis:  (from Amazon)

"We lived under a sky so blue in Idaho right near the towns of Hunt and Eden but we were not welcomed there." In early 1942, thirteen-year-old Mina Masako Tagawa and her Japanese-American family are sent from their home in Seattle to an internment camp in Idaho. What do you do when your home country treats you like an enemy? This memorable and powerful novel in verse, written by award-winning author Mariko Nagai, explores the nature of fear, the value of acceptance, and the beauty of life. As thought-provoking as it is uplifting, Dust of Eden is told with an honesty that is both heart-wrenching and inspirational.

I enjoyed this book for young readers.  There was formatting issues, made worse by the fact I think that some of this book was intended to be formatted as poetry, but I kept with it and it was a very good read, especially for young children and not-so-young children.  This episode of history isn't something that was mentioned much for a very long time for those who were not directly affected by it.  I remember being horrified to learn what happened to the American Japanese during WWII in my AP history class in high school.

I would recommend this book.