01 May / A Boy No More by Harry Mazer [in Bloomsbury Review]
The return in a new paperback edition of the second of a resonating historical trilogy that follows the young life of Adam Pelko. In A Boy at War, Adam is a high school student who experiences first-hand the horrors of the attack on Pearl Harbor, losing his father and trying to understand his own contradictory feelings toward his Japanese American best friend.
In A Boy No More, Adam has moved to California, where the war is not nearly as far away as he thought, as he travels to nearby Manzanar prison camp to deliver a message to his best friend Davi’s family. [On the book’s final page, Mazer adds a new author’s note that draws pointed parallels to the post-9/11 round-ups of Arab and Muslim Americans to the Japanese American internment experience.]
In the final installment, Heroes Don’t Run, Adam enlists and is sent to the front, still in touch with Davi, who has also enlisted to prove his American loyalty even as his family remains locked behind barbed wire.
Review: “In Celebration of Asian Pacific American Month: A Literary Survey,” The Bloomsbury Review, May/June 2006
Readers: Middle Grade, Young Adult
Published: 2006 (new paperback edition)