Garden of Stones [Paperback]

When the police come to question Lucy Takeda regarding a murder, she is forced to reveal the past she has kept secret from her daughter for nearly forty years. In 1942, Lucy was an intelligent, pretty fourteen year old mourning the recent death of her father, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour and all US residents with Japanese ancestry were forcibly 'relocated' to camps established for the duration of the war. Sent with her mother, the beautiful but mercurial, Miyako, to a camp in California's desert, the mother and daughter are forced to endure the trials of corruption, injustice and tragedy.

Garden of Stones is a moving, emotional story of loss, prejudice, love and survival. Flashbacks reveal the harrowing experiences of Lucy and her mother in the poorly constructed and under resourced internment camp. While the prisoners did their best to create some semblance of a normal life during their interment, Littlefield describes overflowing toilets, badly prepared food and a shocking lack of privacy, conditions thousands of internee's were forced to endure for years. It's a confronting historical circumstance post-WW2 generations are largely ignorant of and the author portrays the situation with compassionate honesty.

After the shock of arrival at Manzanar, Lucy's natural optimism and energy asserts itself and she works as a courier while attending the camp school. Still mired in grief it is weeks before Miyako, urged on by her sister in law, shakes of her debilitative depression to begin work as a seamstress in the camp factory. Lucy is overjoyed that her mother is finally adjusting to life within the camp until her innocence is shattered when she learns the emotionally fragile Miyako, is being forced to submit to the sickening desires of the camp officials. Unable to extricate herself from the officer's attentions Miyako is led to commit a desperate act that will change everything for Lucy.

Lucy is such a lovely child, spirited, smart and resilient, so the contrast with her adult self in the dual time narrative is unbearably poignant, even though at times I felt it was intrusive. For Lucy's daughter Patty, to whom Lucy is an enigma, understanding her mother's early life becomes key to absolving her of the present murder. As she uncovers her mother's past she is stunned by the revelations, though there are still many secrets that Lucy keeps, as a mother determined to protect her child.

Well written, with wonderful characterisation and an intriguing storyline, Garden of Stones is a heartbreaking, fascinating and poignant tale of struggle and survival whose bittersweet ending haunts you long after the final page is turned.

I once heard a song (by Kasey Chambers?) on TV with the line: "If you're not pissed off at the world, then you're just not paying attention." So true. And it's impossible to read Sophie Littlefield's GARDEN OF STONES without getting pissed off at the American government during World War II.

I didn't know about the internment camps. Back in the 1940s, if you were in the US but had Japanese ancestry, they assumed you were an enemy, a spy, or whatever false accusation they could come up with. And thus so many innocent civilians were stolen from their lives and dumped into "internment camps". I don't even know what that means, but the very fact they existed screams of racial profiling, prejudice, and all that other awful stuff.

The Pearl Harbor bombing and the unrelated death of Renjiro Takeda changes little Lucy Takeda's life forever. She and her mother are sent to an internment camp in Manzanar, where events there continue to haunt Lucy well into the 1970s.

GARDEN OF STONES will break your heart. It certainly broke mine. And if you're not affected, then you're just not paying attention.

P.S. I received a basic Australian high school education. We only learned about internment/concentration/death camps in Europe.

Sophie Littlefield's latest novel, Garden of Stones, opens in San Francisco in 1978. The first chapter anticipates the murder of an old man. The second chapter introduces Patty Takeda and her mother Lucy. Patty, visiting her mother in the days leading up to her (Patty's) wedding, wakes to find Lucy having an early morning chat with a police inspector. Lucy is being questioned because she knew the victim decades prior, and neighborhood residents placed her at the scene. With her horrible facial scaring, she's hard to miss. The third chapter is where the novel's structure becomes apparent. It flashes us back to the Los Angeles of 1941.

Having just met the caustic older Lucy, we are now introduced to the stunningly beautiful adolescent version. This privileged young girl is about to suffer a series of blows leading up to the United States' entry into the war. Her Japanese heritage is suddenly a huge liability. From there, the novel moves back and forth in time between the events of 1978 and those in the 1940's--with the bulk of the tale occurring in the past. Lucy is sent to the Manzanar internment camp, along with her family, friends, and neighbors. It is events that occurred at Manzanar that directly cultivated the woman Lucy was to become--and perhaps to the murder that has occurred.

Now, I have been a fan of Ms. Littlefield's for years, and I love the sheer breadth and depth of what she writes from comic mysteries to zombie apocalypses. The set-up above seems like another mystery, but truthfully, it's more of a historic drama. The subject of Japanese internment strikes close to home to me--literally--having spent the past decade living a block from San Francisco's Japantown. My neighborhood was greatly impacted by this shameful period of California's history. I think fiction can be a powerful medium for evoking history. Through fiction, stories live on and are humanized.

I also think that a lot of research went into this novel, and yet I felt somewhat frustrated by viewing this history through the eyes of an unsophisticated teenage girl. Those flashback sections of the novel had something of a YA feel about them. Now, I have nothing against young adult fiction--I read a ton of it--but here I was hungering for a little more...detail ...maturity ... substance. That would be my complaint.

That said, I found myself very caught up in the story of these characters. Littlefield writes, "It was as if her mother had once been an entirely different person, and Patty faulted herself for never having seen far enough into her depths, for not being curious enough to coax out the story until now." Lucy Takeda lived an extraordinary life in a period of great historic significance. As events led up to what felt like a climax, I realized that I was only at the center of the tale. As Lucy matured, I became more and more invested in her story. The frustration I'd felt earlier in the novel disappeared. Character development has always been Ms. Littlefield's strength, and that is again the case here. Still, by the time I'd reached the novel's end, she managed to truly surprise me with a couple of unexpected plot twists. One, in particular, was really cleverly done.

Ultimately, the murder that opens this novel is little more than a framing device, but as such it works well. Garden of Stones is a great choice for readers interested in mother-daughter relationships, or who are simply looking for a great story set against a historic backdrop. While it took me a little while to become fully invested in the tale, the deeper I read, the more I enjoyed this novel.