Book written by Marcia Savin
Report written by Latham Piper
This book is a fiction book that is based in the period of World War Two, which is about the years of 1930 to 1945. It is about a girl whose name is Ruthie Fox. Ruthie Fox lived in San Francisco, California. One day when Ruthie Fox goes to school, she finds her best friend Shirl, and a girl named Barbara T., picking on a new girl. Shirl and Barbara T. were calling her “Jap” and telling her to “go back to Japan where she came from.” Shirl would not let any one be ‘Mitzis´ friend, Ruthie doesn´t take orders and becomes Mitzis´ friend any way.
One day Mitzi wasn´t at school or at her house either. Later Ruthie finds out that she has been put in an Internment camp that the army made out of the race track, Taforan. Ruthie got through elementary and went on to junior high. At the six grade graduation Ruthie wished that Mitzi could be there.
All the time that Ruthie was growing up she was writing letters to Mitzi; and often had to wait a couple of weeks to get a return to her letters. One time she never got a return to her letter, and she wondered what happened to Mitzi. Then she got a letter from Mitzi saying that she was going to move to another camp. Ruthie didn´t hear from her again until she got a letter from Mitzi toward the end of the war asking if she could meet at the Chinese Tea Garden.
Ruthie got to the Chinese Tea Garden first and was feeling very nervous about saying the wrong things to a person who had been locked up for three years. When Mitzi got there neither one of them recognized each other at first, because they were both grown up. They were both very happy to see each other and they seemed to be a little uncomfortable. They walked through the Tea Garden to the tea house but a lady in a kimono said that was not open for business. The two girls sat down on a bench and were reunited.
I thought that this book was very moving and I liked the way that the author fitted the idea with her own experience of finding a Japanese American Girl being picked on by other girl when she was growing up during World war Two. This book in some parts was pretty sad and reading it was almost as if it was a biography of a real person.