While I Was Away

Merci Suárez Changes Gears

Bea Is for Blended

Right as Rain

Clover Moon

Little Hero Boy LCPL Anthony Aguirre

Stef Soto, Taco Queen

What We Saw

“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

While I Was Away

Waka T. Brown, 2021

Merci Suárez Changes Gears

Meg Medina, 2018

Bea Is for Blended

Lindsey Stoddard, 2021

Right as Rain

Lindsey Stoddard, 2019

Clover Moon

Jacqueline Wilson, Nick Sharratt, 2016

Little Hero Boy LCPL Anthony Aguirre

Christina Salinas Castillo, 2023

Stef Soto, Taco Queen

Jennifer Torres, 2017

What We Saw

Aaron Hartzler, Mary Downing Hahn, 2022