We Are Not Free (MP3 CD)
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Staff Reviews
An immersive, heart-breaking chronicle, told in 14 voices, of the incarceration of Japanese-Americans after the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. Uprooted from their lives in San Francisco, the teens try to stay bonded amid the flood of conflicting emotions that accompany their relocation and loss of freedom. While the internment has been the focus of other books for young readers and has long been recognized as a shameful fact of American history, We Are Not Free still startles.
— Carol MullerDescription
"All around me, my friends are talking, joking, laughing. Outside is the camp, the barbed wire, the guard towers, the city, the country that hates us. We are not free. But we are not alone." From New York Times best-selling and acclaimed author Traci Chee comes We Are Not Free, the collective account of a tight-knit group of young Nisei, second-generation Japanese American citizens, whose lives are irrevocably changed by the mass U.S. incarcerations of World War II. Fourteen teens who have grown up together in Japantown, San Francisco. Fourteen teens who form a community and a family, as interconnected as they are conflicted. Fourteen teens whose lives are turned upside down when over 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry are removed from their homes and forced into desolate incarceration camps. In a world that seems determined to hate them, these young Nisei must rally together as racism and injustice threaten to pull them apart.