Home of the Brave

Starred review from February 25, 2002
Breaking from such previous works as Tea with Milk and Grandfather's Journey, which featured a realistic sequence of events, Caldecott Medalist Say here enters the realm of dream—or rather, nightmare. The opening image shows a man dwarfed by an ominous, craggy stone edifice at the edge of a shore, as he prepares to step into his kayak. In the next spread, the man, wearing a red helmet and vest that match his vessel, hurls over a waterfall; the sky resembles billowing black smoke that blends with the rocky cliffs ("The man closed his eyes and held his breath"). Say's use of light and dark has a haunting effect, as the man first surfaces in an underground tunnel with a faint glimmer of sunlight; the light then shifts from horizontal to vertical as it illuminates a ladder. Barren land awaits above, with a single structure: "Must be an Indian reservation, he thought." Two children sit against an adobe ruin with nametags around their necks, explaining they are "from the camp." Details in the meticulously rendered watercolors reveal that the children are referring to an internment camp: a row of abandoned identical wooden houses sit on the desert floor of a valley (and hark back to the deserted Indian reservation); thousands of children with identical tags chant "Take us home!"; searchlights from high watchtowers follow them as they flee. Other details link the hero's fate with theirs, but the final image is uplifting. Much remains enigmatic: most children will require the aid of an older reader to make sense of the historical context, and may be put off by the dark and lonely vistas. However, the images create an internal logic of their own, as emotionally convincing as any waking experience. All ages.

March 1, 2002
Gr 4 Up-While Say strives to call attention to the plight of Japanese-Americans unjustly interred in camps during World War II, this enigmatic picture book may serve only to confuse. A man embarks on a kayak trip, loses his boat and gear in churning rapids, and ends up in a cave. He emerges in a desert where he encounters two girls wearing name tags who are "Waiting to go home." The three struggle through the wind-swept desert to what they believe is a town, but in reality is a row of wooden, tar-papered buildings. There the horrified man stares through a window to find nothing but a tag with his name on it, while outside a large group of children chant, "Take us home!" Bellowing loudspeakers send the children scampering away, leaving behind a tag bearing the name of the man's mother. The weary traveler climbs back down into the cave and falls asleep. When he awakens, he and a different group of children watch as the wind sends name tags lying on the ground flying into the air. The man releases the two tags he has found as well. Say's large, realistic watercolors bordered in white appear to the right of each page of text. The desert scenes are rendered in gray and sepia tones and aptly convey the starkness of the surroundings. The cover picture in which the man and girls appear as tiny figures before an endless row of barracks and immense mountains emphasizes their powerlessness. Pictures of the empty buildings and the children, their mouths rounded in pleas for "home," are particularly chilling. The released tags at the end offer some hopeful light, but readers will need help finding their way through this dark, puzzling journey.-Marianne Saccardi, Norwalk Community College, CT

Copyright 2002 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2002
Gr. 5-8. This picture book for older readers starts as a classic time-travel adventure: a young man hurtles down the rapids in a kayak, is swept into an underground river, and emerges to find himself in the desert, near what he thinks is a ruined Indian reservation. He meets children with name tags, Japanese Americans like himself, who live in an internment camp, and he finds his own name tag there. "Take us home!" the children cry, but thundering voices and blinding lights shoot from the watchtower. The young man returns to his kayak and finds contemporary children there with name tags like his, which they scatter over the mountains. The watercolor paintings are spellbinding, evoking the desert and mountains of Ansel Adams' photos and also the edgy close-ups of the surrealist painters. But what does it all mean? Is the wild journey a metaphor for how it felt to be suddenly swept away to the camps? Who are the children at the end? What do their tags mean? Say is just too elliptical this time--and yet he does pose troubling questions about the West as the land of the free and the home of the brave.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2002, American Library Association.)

July 1, 2002
Beyond the fact of its setting in an internment camp for Japanese Americans, little about this ponderous picture book fable is clear. A kayaking man finds two children wearing ID tags, but the internment camp they've come from appears abandoned. Perhaps all three are figures in a ghostly shifting of time, memory, and conscience. If the pictures fail to shed life on the story, they are often in themselves sparely poignant scenes of lost children.

(Copyright 2002 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)