Flowers from Mariko - Hardcover

Rick Noguchi; Michelle Reiko Kumata; Deneen Jenks

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1584300329 ISBN 13: 9781584300328

Publisher: Lee & Low Books, 2001

Synopsis

After Mariko's family is freed from a Japanese-American internment camp, they face numerous hardships until Mariko plants and nurtures the seeds her father gave her, causing a beautiful garden of hope to blossom, in a touching story of family, love, and perseverance.

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Reviews

Gr 1-4-This is the story of a Japanese-American girl whose family has suffered through three years of internment at a desolate "relocation center" during World War II. When her father returns to California, he finds that his truck has been sold and that their former landlord has disappeared with the proceeds. This sad event, along with the loss of most of their other possessions, means that Mariko's father cannot immediately resume his gardening business. The family settles into a bleak trailer park established for returning internees. Bit by bit, they are able to rebuild their lives. The child's father finds some discarded gardening equipment that he can fix and Mariko starts a flower garden that comes to symbolize their rebirth. An author's note provides some brief background that allows children to put the story in context. The poignancy of this family's ordeal and the tragedy of the forced removal during the war are dimmed somewhat by the flat tones of both the text and the illustrations. While the story is not unmoving, the static pictures and straightforward prose diminish the pathos inherent in these events. Eve Bunting's So Far from the Sea (Clarion, 1998) is a more affecting portrait of the consequences of Executive Order 9066 for Japanese-American families. Flowers is an additional purchase for libraries needing supplemental materials on this important episode in American history.

Rosalyn Pierini, San Luis Obispo City-County Library, CA

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Husband-and-wife writing team Noguchi and Jenks plus artist Kumata all make their children's book debuts with this affecting tale with an eerily timely theme. "Just because I look like the enemy doesn't mean I am," insists Mariko, a Japanese-American girl whose family was forced to live in an internment camp after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Now, three years later, as she packs up to leave the camp's barbed-wire boundaries, she watches her father tend to his tiny flower garden in the camp, and remembers accompanying him on his rounds as a gardener before their relocation. Free to go at last, Mariko's father travels to their former home to retrieve his gardening truck, yet returns without it, explaining that their landlord sold the vehicle and moved away. They must take lodging in a trailer park built "for families who didn't have anywhere else to go." The authors create strong imagery with apt metaphors (Mariko hears her worried parents whispering at night, "their words circling the dark rooms like birds without a safe place to land"). Near their trailer, Mariko plants a flower garden, which lifts the spirits of those around her. Kumata's suitably spare, mixed media pictures feature an intriguing array of fabrics and textures, yet the characters frequently appear wooden against backdrops that are uniformly bleak. Finally, Mariko's father announces that he has gathered and repaired enough gardening tools to re-launch his business concluding the story on a hopeful note. Ages 6-up.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Ages 5-8. In this story about a child helping her father recover his dignity, Japanese internment camps serve as part of the backdrop. Mariko's Japanese family is one of thousands to be incarcerated in a camp during World War II. There's joy when the family is released but also great sadness: the family must live in a temporary trailer park, and Father, a gardener before the war, finds himself without work, his self-worth shaken. It's Mariko's tiny flower garden that helps him recover hope. Adults will need to explain the history before reading the story because the internment camp is simply called "camp" in the text (an author's note at the back will help), and the illustrations are sometimes surprisingly racially ambiguous (the characters occasionally look more Latino than Japanese). Ken Mochizuki's Baseball Saved Us (1993) does is more successful in evoking the internment camp setting. This story does, however, put a complex subject into understandable terms for young children, and when paired with a book such as David Adler's The Babe and I (1999) can help open discussion about the history and about parental dignity, a topic that crosses racial and ethnic lines. Catherine Andronik
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Lee & Low Books
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1584300329
• ISBN 13: 9781584300328
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 32