A Place to Belong
No. of pages 416
Published: 2019
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World War II has ended, but while America has won the war, twelve-year-old Hanako feels lost. To her, the world, and her world, seems irrevocably broken.
America, the only home she's ever known, imprisoned then rejected her and her family--and thousands of other innocent Americans--because of their Japanese heritage, because Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
Japan, the country they've been forced to move to, the country they hope will be the family's saving grace, where they were supposed to start new and better lives, is in shambles because America dropped bombs of their own--one on Hiroshima unlike any other in history. And Hanako's grandparents live in a small village just outside the ravaged city.
The country is starving, the black markets run rampant, and countless orphans beg for food on the streets, but how can Hanako help them when there is not even enough food for her own brother?
Hanako feels she could crack under the pressure, but just because something is broken doesn't mean it can't be fixed. Cracks can make room for gold, her grandfather explains when he tells her about the tradition of kintsukuroi--fixing broken objects with gold lacquer, making them stronger and more beautiful than ever. As she struggles to adjust to find her place in a new world, Hanako will find that the gold can come in many forms, and family may be hers.
This book has been graded for interest at 10-14 years.
There are 416 pages in this book. This book was published 2019 by Simon & Schuster .
Julia Kuo is the creator of 20 Ways to Draw a Cat and 44 Other Awesome Animals as well as the charming board book Everyone Eats . Julia also created the cover and interior artwork for Newbery Medal-winning author Cynthia Kadohata's The Thing About Luck and Place I Belong and New York Times bestselling author Jenny Han's Clara Lee and the Apple Pie Dream . She lives in Chicago. Julia Kuo's favorite sound is kuk-kuk-kuk (the sound an angry squirrel makes). She is the illustrator of Go, Little Green Truck and has created illustrations for American Greetings, the Cleveland Public Library, The New York Times , and Capitol Records, among many others. She works from Chicago for most of the year, and from Taipei over the winter.