Profound text and moving illustrations combine to vividly recreate the imprisonment of a man's family in the Japanese internment camps during World War II, where he encounters a group of children with strange name tags pinned to their coats, and, sensing their helplessness, removes their tags in hopes that one day Americans will be seen as one people. 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 Cahners Business Information, Inc. 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. Hazel Rochman Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved "Say's use of darkness in the portrayal of childhood innocence is a poignant interpretation of what children, whatever their culture, must feel when so tiny and scared and far from where they long to be." -- Review Allen Say was born in Yokohama, Japan, in 1937. He dreamed of becoming a cartoonist from the age of six, and, at age twelve, apprenticed himself to his favorite cartoonist, Noro Shinpei. For the next four years, Say learned to draw and paint under the direction of Noro, who has remained Say's mentor. Say illustrated his first children's book -- published in 1972 -- in a photo studio between shooting assignments. For years, Say continued writing and illustrating children's books on a part-time basis. But in 1987, while illustrating THE BOY OF THE THREE-YEAR NAP (Caldecott Honor Medal), he recaptured the joy he had known as a boy working in his master's studio. It was then that Say decided to make a full commitment to doing what he loves best: writing and illustrating children's books. Since then, he has written and illustrated many books, including TREE OF CRANES and GRANDFATHER'S JOURNEY, winner of the 1994 Caldecott Medal. He is a full-time writer and illustrator living in Portland, Oregon. Used Book in Good Condition