"Chicago, 1944: twenty-year-old Aki Ito and her parents have just been released from Manzanar, the California concentration camp where they have been "interned" by the US government since the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, together with thousands of other Japanese Americans. The life the Itos were forced to leave behind is gone; instead, they are being resettled in Chicago, where Aki's older sister, Rose, was sent months earlier as a forerunner of the...

Strawberry Yellow is set in the strawberry fields of Watsonville, California, where young Mas first arrived from Hiroshima in the 1940s. Now a retired gardener who lives in an L.A. suburb, he returns for the funeral of a cousin and quickly gets entangled in the murder of a young woman. Was his cousin murdered, too? Mas has to figure out what happened, keep himself safe in the face of considerable peril, and uncover the mystery of the Strawberry Yellow...

"Los Angeles, 1946: It's been two years since Aki Ito and her family were released from Manzanar detention center and resettled in Chicago with other Japanese Americans. Now the Itos have finally been allowed to return home to California--but nothing is as they left it. The entire Japanese American community is starting from scratch, with thousands of people living in dismal refugee camps while they struggle to find new houses and jobs in over-crowded...

With her parents on the verge of separating, a devastated twelve-year-old Japanese American girl spends the summer in Los Angeles with her grandparents, where she folds paper cranes into wedding displays, becomes involved with a young skateboarder, and learns how complicated relationships can be.