This story is an interesting mix of fact and fiction. The author writes about an alternate reality in which she, at age 17, was transported back in time to the 1940s to catch glimpses of her grandmother as a teen. Her grandmother was one of roughly 120,000 Japanese-Americans forced into an internment camp during WWII. Teenage Kiku finds herself living next door to her grandmother's family in an un-insulated wooden barrack in the Topaz, Arizona camp. But she is unable to gather the courage to meet her grandma- and also, Kiku does not speak Japanese, one of many forms of cultural loss which effects her family generations after the camps. Instead Kiku befriends some of the other high schoolers in camp and gains a deeper understanding of the hardships they faced, such as food shortages and loyalty tests. The book is beautifully illustrated in a palette heavy in blues, rusts, and dusty browns. The story unfolds a bit slowly, but it brings an important and accessible new look at this time period. It would be a good companion to George Takai's They Called Us Enemy, and Hughes acknowledges her debt to Octavia Bulter's Kindred in the end notes.