Pearl
by Sherri L. Smith; illus. by Christine Norrie
Intermediate, Middle School    Graphix/Scholastic    144 pp.
8/24    9781338029437    $24.99
Paper ed.  9781338029420    $12.99
e-book ed.  9781338029444    $12.99

In this graphic novel, a Japanese American girl visiting family outside Hiroshima is trapped there after Japan bombs Pearl Harbor. Amy’s sōsobo (great-grandmother), whose underwater pearl-diving feats are beloved ­family lore, urges the girl to learn survival, just as she had to. Amy does survive, even as life gets more and more brutal. When the Japanese military in Hiroshima makes her translate American radio broadcasts, Amy feels like a ­traitor—until she learns that her parents are in an ­American prison camp and that her baby brother has died. Amy is devastated, but Sōsobo, on her deathbed, still insists Amy survive, and even thrive, because “life is a treasure.” In 1945, Amy is released from work—just as the bomb is dropped on Hiroshima. She lives, barely (a friend dies in her arms), and is later asked by the Americans to transcribe other survivors’ stories; a haunting full-page panel shows a bomb cloud of papers rising from her typewriter as people share their experiences. Eleven years after arriving in Japan, Amy is finally allowed to return to her parents, who have survived. Her fight to endure is fittingly depicted as an underwater tussle with death and a triumphant return to the surface holding aloft a treasure—a giant pearl. Black-and-white illustrations colored with a solemn slate blue make expert use of the format to tell this painful and little-known history of Japanese American “strandees” whose stories often went untold for fear of American retaliation against “traitors.”

From the "September/October 2024 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.