Silver Like Dust

October 31, 2011
Between 1942 and 1945 110,00 people of Japanese descent were sent to internment camps in the U.S. Grant tells the story of her own grandparents, who were “relocated” from their Los Angeles home to Wyoming’s Heart Mountain Relocation Center. Unfortunately, Grant, an English instructor at Penn State and recipient of the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship in creative nonfiction, has chosen to tell this story in a segmented fashion that fails to cohere; mixing her account of getting to know her grandmother, her grandmother’s revelations of her own history, and tidbits of historical context diminishes emphasis and immediacy. Ultimately, the narrative becomes tedious (“A runner, a woman in an all-pink Nike outfit, approaches on the walking path, and we switch to single file to allow her to pass”) and dissonant (“Rommel ravaged North Africa and marched toward Cairo”).

November 1, 2011
In her debut, Grant (English/Penn State Univ.) teases out the story of her Japanese grandmother's internment during World War II. The author weaves rich supporting material throughout the narrative, providing a solid context for the relocation and internment of 112,000 Japanese throughout the West. For much of the book, Grant coaxes recollections from her grandmother Obaachan, "prying information from her that she prefers to keep herself." After being wrenched from their San Francisco home shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Grant's family was sent to a relocation camp in California, where her grandparents met and courted, walking the Pomona fairgrounds that served as their initial internment camp. Later relocated to Heart Mountain, Wyo., they continued their relationship, married and raised their first child. Grant offers a chronicle of daily life in the camps, with its unfamiliar American food, lack of privacy and modesty, baby gifts from the Quakers, intense cold and craft classes to help pass the time. The Japanese concept of shikataganai--surrendering to whatever fate lies ahead--pervaded the culture of the camps, fostering despair and listlessness. This is also the story of a young woman navigating her marriage to a strong but exacting personality and family ties weakened by the stress and separation of internment. Eventually the couple left Wyoming for a chance to work in a food-processing plant in New Jersey, where they settled in and quietly absorbed the shame of their incarceration. Well-written book about life in a Japanese internment camp and the social and political forces that allowed their existence--though Obaachan's reticence subdues the emotional intensity of the story.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

January 1, 2012
Growing up in rural Pennsylvania, wanting to fit in, Grant felt far removed from her Japanese heritage, including the internment of her grandparents during WWII. She'd visited Obaachan (which means grandmother ) in Florida since childhood but did not feel close to her. Later, with a new, burning curiosity about her family and that chapter of their history, Grant was compelled to visit as an adult and draw her reluctant grandmother into remembrances of the past. Slowly, Obaachan recalls the family's immigrant history, the segregation and limited prospects even before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and the internment of Japanese in the U.S. that followed. Two of Obaachan's brothers served in the military while the family was interned in the camp, where she lost her mother and met her future husband. Grant offers a portrait of the stoicism and patriotism of her family as well as differences in generations, as the stories evoke her own feelings of rage. But throughout is a portrait of a courageous woman who endured hardship and later established a delicate balance of trust with her granddaughter that allowed her to finally tell the family's story.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)