The two form a friendship that is paradoxical in nature. Haruko, a 17-year-old Japanese-American, wonders why her family is imprisoned. Margot, a bright 16-year-old German-American from Iowa, is displeased by her father’s growing allegiance with the Nazis. Trust and the human inclination to “default to truth” (Gladwell, 2019, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know) is explored.

Externally, the girls are different and see the same events through different eyes internally the universality of emotions shows that they are intricately connected. The story offers the reader a deep sense of empathy for each character. Told from two perspectives, a teenage German-American and a teenage Japanese-American live alongside one another in an internment camp in Crystal City, Texas during the war. It provides contextual background information for what was occurring.

The first book makes the second reading more compelling. The text speaks to the injustices that his mother and father experienced as a result of political rhetoric and fear generated. The text moves back and forth between George Takei’s story as seen through the eyes of a child and explains the injustice political actions and its effects upon his family and other people of Japanese ancestry living in America at the time. The illustrations depict the depth of emotions, fear, frustration and suffering experienced by the individuals. Reading the graphic novel first provided background information and set the context for the confusing and uncertain times. They Called Us Enemy provides readers with George Takei’s personal experience as a Japanese American, told primarily through the eyes of a young child as a graphic novel while The War Outside tells of the lesser known (family) internment camp that held prisoners of Japanese and German descent as a historical fiction novel. Both are about the internment camps established during World War II. MICHELE: Pairing They Called Us Enemy, which we discussed last week, and The War Outside proved to be a worthwhile reading experience. This week, they look at The War Outside by Monica Hesse. Michele and Yoo Kyung continue on the theme of Rethinking Cultural and Physical Borders in Children’s Literature: Understanding Today’s Global Politics Through History. By Michele Ebersole, University of Hawaii, Hilo, HI, and Yoo Kyung Sung, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM