Salisbury spares few details-the fear, the horror, the sounds, the smells all envelop the reader as they do the characters. On a baseball field when the first planes fly over, Tomi and his best friend, Billy, climb a nearby tree to escape the strafing and to see what is happening. Neither his grandfather nor the rest of the family can ignore the seriousness of the situation after the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor. Well aware of the increasing tension between native islanders and Japanese immigrants, Tomi desperately tries to tone down his grandfather's displays of nationalistic and family pride, a job the boy finds distasteful (he, too, loves the stories of his ancestors), yet horrifyingly necessary. mount, eighth-grader Tomi finds himself more and more the target of his classmates' and neighbors' suspicions. Salisbury captures the dilemma of the Japanese who lived in Hawaii during World War II through the narrator, Tomi, born in Hawaii, and his Japanese parents, who had escaped the poverty of Japan, only to find themselves enmeshed in a war they are unprepared to fight.
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