Block Seventeen (book)

Novel by Kimiko Guthrie set in 2012 written in the first-person voice of a mixed-race Sansei woman who is affected by the legacy of her family's wartime incarceration in ways she initially denies, but comes to understand over the course of the story.

The story begins with narrator Jane Thompson telling her child about her early memories of her own mother as well as the evolution of her relationship with the child's father, Shiro Yamamoto, with whom Jane has been together for over five years. There are periodic flashback scenes from Jane's mother Sumi's early life as a Nisei child in Los Angeles before the war and her family's incarceration at the Santa Anita and Rohwer camps. At the latter, Sumi's baby brother Aki dies shortly after his birth; Jane is named after Aki, though she chooses to go by "Jane." Jane navigates Shiro's anger and paranoia, Sumi's disappearance into the online world while refusing to talk about her past, and her own sleepwalking and inability to work.

Author Kimiko Guthrie is a teacher of dance and theater at California State University East Bay. She writes on her website that the novel was "inspired by her experience growing up with a mother who was incarcerated in an internment camp during WWII."

Might also like: Why She Left Us by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto; A Bridge Between Us by Julie Shigekuni; After the Bloom by Leslie Shimotakahara.