Fish for Jimmy: Inspired by One Family’s Experience in a Japanese American Internment Camp

After Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government imprisons Jimmy, his brother, and his Japanese-American parents in an internment camp. Without the fresh food he loves, Jimmy stops eating. Illustrator Yamasaki (Honda: The Boy Who Dreamed of Cars), in her authorial debut, draws from her own ancestral history as she describes the family’s difficulties, yet she resists dropping hints about what’s to come, making the unfolding of older brother Taro’s plan a genuine surprise: “Quiet as a breeze, Taro wrapped the shears he had secretly borrowed from the camp garden in his mother’s scarf.” Once Taro has successfully cut through the camp’s barbed-wire fence, he makes his way through unfamiliar woods in the dark to a stream, where he catches fish for Jimmy. “Mother laughed as Jimmy ate at last. Taro had forgotten the sound of his mother’s laugh, and it was beautiful.” Only the artwork falters; the uncertain perspective and muddy contours of the figures can make the magical-realist elements of Yamasaki’s paintings difficult to parse. Although memoirs of politically sensitive times are often subdued, this one is unexpectedly suspenseful. Ages 6–10. (Apr.)