Place to Belong

Hanako and her family—her father, mother, and little brother—are moving to Japan. The war is over, a war which the family spent interred in a detention camp for Japanese Americans. Roosevelt offered the adults an opportunity to revoke their citizenship and to be returned to Japan and Hanako's parents have decided to do this. They are going to stay with Hanako's grandparents on a country farm outside a large city, Hiroshima, a city that was rumored in the camps to have been bombed.

I loved this story of a girl and her family who are trying to find their place in the world, a world that is shifting, changing, where no one feels certain of what home is. It's a story I haven't heard before now, and it's delicately told in that beautiful Japanese way of honing in on a single flower petal and then zooming out suddenly to the big truths of the world.

I'm pretty sure this will be my favorite middle grade read of the year.