The book, Weedflower, is about a 12 year old girl named Sumiko. It takes place before and after Pearl Harbor. Franklin D. Roosevelt signs a bill that allows the army to move all peoples of Japanese ancestry, even if like Sumiko was born in the US. As suspicions grow, Sumiko and her family find themselves being shipped to an internment camp in one of the hottest deserts in the United States. The camp she is moved to is also on a Native American reservation and there she finds that the life she has come to known is now gone. Here, she finds the Native Americans and feels that the Japanese are still unwanted as before they moved here. She meets a young Mohave boy who might just become her first real friend, when he can ever stop being angry about the fact that the internment camp is on his tribe's land. This book tells the truth of how Native Americans and Japanese met through the eyes of a young girl, desperate to fight it, make friends, and find a normal life
Twelve-year-old Sumiko feels her life has been made up of two parts: before Pearl Harbor and after it. The good part and the bad part. Raised on a flower farm in California, Sumiko is used to being the only Japanese girl in her class. Even when the other kids tease her, she always has had her flowers and family to go home to. That all changes after the horrific events of Pearl Harbor. Other Americans start to suspect that all Japanese people are spies for the emperor, even if, like Sumiko, they were born in the United States! As suspicions grow, Sumiko and her family find themselves being shipped to an internment camp in one of the hottest deserts in the United States. The vivid color of her previous life is gone forever, and now dust storms regularly choke the sky and seep into every crack of the military barrack that is her new home. Sumiko soon discovers that the camp is on an Indian reservation and that the Japanese are as unwanted there as they'd been at home. But then she meets a young Mohave boy who might just become her first real friend...if he can ever stop being angry about the fact that the internment camp is on his tribe's land. With searing insight and clarity, Newbery Medal-winning author Cynthia Kadohata explores an important and painful topic through the eyes of a young girl who yearns to belong. Weedflower is the story of the rewards and challenges of a friendship across the racial divide, as well as the based-on-real-life story of how the meeting of Japanese Americans and Native Americans changed the future of both
“Rivers stopped flowing along the banks so that they could hear Orpheus, whose music was more harmonious than theirs.” And “Others maintain that Orpheus had reached the sunlight and turned to Eurydice, believing she was out, too.” hope this helps
