Day 19 of Summer 2019 #Bookaday Challenge: Paper Wishes

Vlog Transcript Below

Slide 1: Hi! My name is Kate Narita. Today is day nineteen of my summer 2019 #bookaday challenge. I will be talking about Paper Wishes.
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Slide 2: What happens in Paper Wishes is the ten-year-old main character, Manami, has to leave her island home in Washington. She’s forced to live in a Japanese-American internment camp. Since she has to leave her dog behind, she becomes mute. The novel is about how she finds her voice. She’s able to find her voice through gardening, art and making space in her heart for another dog.

Slide 3: If your students are unfamiliar with the Japanese-American internment experience, a good book to start with is Baseball Saved Us. Many students are familiar with baseball. Also, this book highlights the discrimination Japanese-Americans experienced when they left the camps as well. In the end of the book the main character is triumphant. The kids will enjoy that.

Slide 4: I first learned about the Japanese-American internment when I saw Chiura Obata’s art. It’s absolutely stunning. Here is one of his prints of Yosemite. 

Slide 5: He was interned at Topaz, which is a different internment camp then the one Manami was interned in. He started an art school for children. He was attacked in 1943 and after that a woman named Hisako Hibi took over the art school. Her granddaughter, Amy Lee-Tai wrote A Place Where Sunflowers Grow. Mari, the main character, uses art and gardening to overcome the challenges of her internment experience at the camp, just like the main character, Manami, uses art and gardening in Paper Wishes.
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The Children of Topaz is an excellent nonfiction resource. It features a classroom diary of students who were interned at Topaz. These two resources go really well together.

Slide 6: All in all, there were ten different Japanese-American internment camps. These next two resources come from peoples’ experiences in Poston, Arizona. The first one is a picture book Write to Me. This is about the postcards that interned Japanese-American children sent their librarian Clara Breed. In turn, she sent them letters, supplies and books which helped make their experience in the camps less harsh. 

If you have a student who is really into this topic, they might want to check out the nonfiction resource Dear Miss Breed. This is a very large book. It’s chock-full of information. Unless you have a student that’s really into nonfiction, they probably won’t be interested. However, if you have a student who wants to learn as much as they can, then I definitely recommend this resource.

Slide 7: The novel that Paper Wishes most reminds me of is The Night Diary by Veera Hiranandani. In The Night Diary, the main character, Nisha, also has to flee her home. She was living in India in 1947 when the British left India and split it into India and Pakistan. When that happened, the Hindi people were no longer welcome in Pakistan. As a result, Nisha has to leave the only home she has ever known to get to India so that she and her family will be safe. Like Manami, Nisha also loses her voice and struggles to find it throughout the novel. 

Slide 8: The last novel I’m going to talk about in this text set is Stealing Our Way Home by Cecilia Galante. Unlike Paper Wishes and The Night Diary this is not historical fiction. This is realistic fiction set in modern day times. The other thing that makes this novel different from the other two is that it’s a dual narrative. So, it alternates perspectives between the brother, Jack, and the sister, Pippa. What Pippa has in common with Manami and Nisha is that she, too, loses her voice. This happens after her mother dies, and she strugglest throughout the novel as well to find her voice.