"Sandy Saito looks back to his childhood in 1940s Vancouver, when he was eight years old. He's a happy kid: he goes to school, reads comic books and is obsessed with baseball -- especially the Asahi baseball team, the pride of the Japanese-Canadian community. Then the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor -- and everything changes. The kids Sandy used to play with every day now call him names and chase him from the playground. He and his family are no longer permitted to go outside at night or visit certain areas of the city. Japanese-Canadians are stripped of their rights, their jobs and their homes, and soon the government begins to round up Japanese families, sending them to internment camps. It isn't long before Sandy's family is among them. The reader accompanies Sandy on his journey to the camp and the seasons that follow in this historically accurate portrayal of a grave chapter in both Canadian and American history. David Namisato's detailed art depicts the 1940s setting with cultural and historical precision, following Sandy and his family as they are forced to leave their home and relocate to a prison camp comprised of crowded, makeshift barracks in a remote site without electricity or running water. The theme of baseball, Sandy's favorite sport, runs through the story as a message of hope and renewal."--

HL430L

Decoding demand: 89 (very high) Semantic demand: 97 (very high) Syntactic demand: 62 (high) Structure demand: 84 (very high)