Growing up in California during the depression isn't easy for eleven-year-old Rinko. She desperately wants to fit in and be like everyone else, but instead she is ridiculed and made to feel different because she is Japanese. But when Aunt Waka comes to visit, and brings with her the old-fashioned wisdom of Japan, she teaches Rinko the importance of her Japanese heritage, and the value of her own strengths and dreams, in this warm and touching story.
"An ingenious simplicity and grace mark the first-person telling of the story of eleven-year-old Rinko and her Japanese family in Berkeley, California. Times are hard for everyone in 1935, but being Japanese is for Rinko an added burden. . . . Compared with the many worldly-wise contemporary book heroines, Rinko in her guilelessness is genuine and refreshing, and her worries and concerns seem wholly natural, honest and convincing".—The Horn Book.
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