A Diamond in the Desert (book)

Before the war, Tetsuo lives with his eight-year-old sister Kimi and parents on a 200-acre farm in California. But his father, a community leader, is arrested after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and Tetsuo, Kimi, and their mother soon find themselves behind barbed wire at Gila River, after a stint in horse stall at the Tulare Assembly Center . Initially discouraged by the lack of privacy, poor food, and dust storms, his spirits are lifted when two neighbor boys and their baseball coach father move in next door, and the father announces a plan to build a baseball diamond in the camp. Tetsuo enthusiastically joins the effort. But when he abandons Kimi to go to baseball practice, causing her to disappear into the desert for a night and contract valley fever, he is devastated and loses his desire to play baseball as Kimi slowly recovers. He works loading trucks at the truck pool with friends, one of whom, Horse, has gone mute after losing his parents on a fishing boat during the attack on Pearl Harbor. Will Tetsuo ever regain his love for baseball? Written in Tetsuo's first person voice (he ages from twelve to sixteen in the novel), the action is episodic, as in a diary.

Author Kathryn Fitzmaurice dreamed of becoming a writer like her science fiction writer grandmother Eleanor Robinson, but settled in as an elementary school teacher based in Dana Point, California. Inspired to start writing again at age forty, her resulting middle grade novel The Year the Swallows Came Early (2009) gained great acclaim. She learned of baseball in the Japanese American concentration camps through a National History Day project by a student whose grandfather played at Gila. She based A Diamond in the Desert on many real events, including the story of Kenichi Zenimura and Zenimura Field, and interviewed former players Tetsuo Furukawa, Jack Shosan Shimasaki, and Howard Zenimura. ^[1]

The events and descriptions of camp life are generally accurate. One small error is a reference to Japanese American guards patrolling the camp (pages 20 and 97); while there were Japanese American policemen in the camp, all guards patrolling the camp perimeter were non-Japanese American. She also writes of Tetsuo's father attending a meeting with War Relocation Authority (WRA) Director Dillon Myer in early 1945 that leads to many families considering leaving the camp; while the WRA certainly encouraged inmates to leave, such efforts had been ongoing for at least two years by that point.

The uniformly positive reviews praised the "restrained vignettes threaded with poetic language" and "fluid language and vivid imagery" as well as the book's potential appeal for reluctant readers. ^[2] Linda Perkins of Booklist notes that "Tetsu's restrained narration occasionally slips into an adult voice, but his feelings and frustrations ring true." ^[3]

Might also like: The Lucky Baseball: My Story in a Japanese-American Internment Camp ; The Journal of Ben Uchida: Citizen 13559, Mirror Lake Internment Camp ; Missing in Action ; Under the Blood Red Sun , House of the Red Fish