A Thousand Steps Into Night

Diary of a Witness

Kendra

Going Over

The Black Kids

Rainbow Boys

Geography Club

The Mockingbirds

“All around me, my friends are talking, joking, laughing. Outside is the camp, the barbed wire, the guard towers, the city, the country that hates us.

We are not free.
But we are not alone.” 

We Are Not Free, is the collective account of a tight-knit group of young Nisei, second-generation Japanese American citizens, whose lives are irrevocably changed by the mass U.S. incarcerations of World War II.

Fourteen teens who have grown up together in Japantown, San Francisco.
Fourteen teens who form a community and a family, as interconnected as they are conflicted.
Fourteen teens whose lives are turned upside down when over 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry are removed from their homes and forced into desolate incarceration camps.
In a world that seems determined to hate them, these young Nisei must rally together as racism and injustice threaten to pull them apart.

Discover Your Child's Next Read

A Thousand Steps Into Night

Traci Chee, 2022

Diary of a Witness

Catherine Ryan Hyde, 2009

Kendra

Coe Booth, 2008

Going Over

Beth Kephart, 2014

The Black Kids

Christina Hammonds Reed, 2020

Rainbow Boys

Alex Sanchez, 2001

Geography Club

Brent Hartinger, 2003

The Mockingbirds

Daisy Whitney, 2010