Stealing Home by J. Torres - HIGH

Stealing Home by J. Torres, 112 pages. GRAPHIC NOVEL. Kids Can Press, 2021. $18.

Language: G (0 swears); Mature Content: PG (internment camps); Violence: G.

BUYING ADVISORY: MS, HS – ADVISABLE

AUDIENCE APPEAL: HIGH

The story follows the family of Sandy Saito, a young Japanese-Canadian boy who is obsessed with baseball, as they lose everything in the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Within the course of a year, the Saito family and 21,000 other citizens were rounded up and shipped inland to hastily constructed camps. Throughout their experience, the Saito family clings to fragments of normalcy, like playing baseball.

This graphic novel serves as a great introduction to the very difficult topic of Japanese internment. It focuses on a family who lived in British Columbia, but the same experience happened to thousands of families along the western coast, in the US and Canada. I feel like Japanese-American internment isn’t something that is addressed very often when discussing WWII history, which tends to focus more on the European theater. I would definitely recommend this for middle school and high school libraries.

BookswithBeddes