As often as possible high school senior Reiko Smith-Mori drives to the nearby California desert to escape from her increasingly claustrophobic life at home and her parents' expectations. There she meets Seth Rogers, a boy from school who shares her love of the desert but also wants a closer relationship with her, which is just adding to her problems because Reiko has a secret. In her mind her older sister, Mika, who died years ago, is always with...

For fourteen-year-old budding artist Minoru Ito, her two brothers, her friends, and the other members of the Japanese-American community in southern California, the three months since Pearl Harbor was attacked have become a waking nightmare: attacked, spat on, and abused with no way to retaliate--and now things are about to get worse, their lives forever changed by the mass incarcerations in the relocation camps.