A Boy No More

"What about what they did to my father?...The Japs killed him!"...I shouldn't have said "Jap," but [Davi] knew I didn't mean him. It was the country where his parents were born. If his parents hadn't come to Hawaii, Davi would have been born there too. I lay there looking up into the dark, thinking, yes, it could have been him on one of those planes.

After witnessing the USS Arizona sink in Pearl Harbor -- with his father aboard -- fifteen-year-old Adam Pelko, along with his mother and young sister, moves from Hawaii to California. Without his dad, facing a new school and new surroundings is hard enough, but then Adam's best friend, Davi Mori, writes from Hawaii asking for help in finding his father. Davi and his family are Japanese American, and his father has been arrested and is imprisoned somewhere in the United States.

What is Adam to do? Can he risk traveling to Manzanar, a Japanese internment camp, and asking questions? At a time when the nation is threatened and all foreigners are viewed with suspicion, who can Adam trust?

In this riveting follow-up to his acclaimed book A Boy at War, Harry Mazer explores questions of friendship and loyalty against the backdrop of World War II, a time when boys had to grow up fast.


Genre: Children's Fiction