Time traveling to explain her family’s experience & others’ community trauma is a quick but thoughtful read. I try to read everything I can about the Japanese Internment/incarceration because ethnic genocide should never be allowed anywhere ever again. I see it happening now, with China seeking to control minority thought/behavior/customs, especially with the Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang. Xenophobia is fear & shows an inherent weakness in a government that supports it. ( )

Time travel brings a girl closer to someone she’s never known.

Sixteen-year-old Kiku, who is Japanese and white, only knows bits and pieces of her family history. While on a trip with her mother to San Francisco from their Seattle home, they search for her grandmother’s childhood home. While waiting for her mother, who goes inside to explore the mall now standing there, a mysterious fog envelops Kiku and displaces her to a theater in the past where a girl is playing the violin. The gifted musician is Ernestina Teranishi, who Kiku later confirms is her late grandmother. To Kiku’s dismay, the fog continues to transport her, eventually dropping her down next door to Ernestina’s family in a World War II Japanese American internment camp. The clean illustrations in soothing browns and blues convey the characters’ intense emotions. Hughes takes inspiration from her own family’s story, deftly balancing complicated national history with explorations of cultural dislocation and biracial identity. As Kiku processes her experiences, Hughes draws parallels to President Donald Trump’s Muslim ban and the incarceration of migrant children. The emotional connection between Kiku and her grandmother is underdeveloped; despite their being neighbors, Ernestina appears briefly and feels elusive to both Kiku and readers up to the very end. Despite some loose ends, readers will gain insights to the Japanese American incarceration and feel called to activism.

A timely and well-paced story of personal discovery. (photographs, author’s note, glossary, further reading) (Graphic historical fantasy. 12-16)

-Kirkus Review

This graphic novel is a historical fiction book, with elements of time travel and personal connection to the author's grandmother who was in Topaz, a Japanese internment camp. The author states in the author's note, "The events in this book are a mix of fact and fiction, history and memory."

The main character, Kiku, goes on a trip to San Francisco with her mom. Suddenly, she finds herself displaced to the 1940's where her grandmother is performing on the violin. She does not know much about her grandmother, as she died before Kiku was born, and her mother has not shared a lot of info with her.

Kiku moves back and forth between the present day and the past, ultimately ending up in a Japanese internment camp with her grandmother and others. Kiku learns about the people who were there, what things were like in the camps, and how many people there created community. She learns that many people resisted and did their best to fight against the situations forced upon them. She realizes the stories she learned at school didn't fully reflect the bravery and resilience of the people there.

Kiku also learns about trauma, passed down from generation to generation, which has impacted her mom and even herself. The art was beautiful and realistic. I really enjoyed following Kiku through her journey of discovery. ( )

This was one of the best graphic novels I have ever read. The combination of time travel and the authentic depiction of the Japenese American experience during WWII was incredible. ( )

Displacement is a graphic novel about the internment of the Japanese in America during WWII. I have read 2 other comics on this subject and they all gave the same information. In this story our heroine Kiku is on vacation in San Francisco where her family is from. The displacements begin when she magically finds herself transported back to the 1940s when her grandmother Ernestina was forced to relocate to an internment camp. Living alongside her young grandmother and other Japanese-American citizens in internment camps, Kiku gets the education she never received in history class. She witnesses the lives of Japanese-Americans who were denied their civil liberties and suffered greatly, but managed to cultivate community and commit acts of resistance in order to survive.

What separates this account of the tragedy from others is the illustration. I like that the comic strips were larger, with 4 to a page. It made the dialogue much larger for me to be able to read on a cell phone. When reading other comics on my phone, I have to enlarge the page in order to be able to read. Then I have to reduce the page in order to turn the page. Author Kiku Hughes drew all the illustrations. This is her first graphic novel and I am very impressed with both her ability to tell a story and her drawing skill.

Hughes makes many insightful quotes in her book. One of them is: "I think sometimes a community's experience is so traumatic, it stays rooted in us even generations later. And the later generations continue to rediscover that experience, since it's still shaping us in ways we might not realize. Like losing the ability to speak Japanese, losing connection to Japanese culture, they're all lasting impacts of the camps that travel down the generations." I never realized before that the generation who suffered through the internment experience would raise their children to be American, not Japanese. They felt it would make successive generations safer from the government. They made sure their descendants did not know how to speak Japanese or cook Japanese food. It was a strategy that the entire generation followed.

Displacement gives an honest history of the internment camps run by the U. S. government during WWII. While it is a sad story, it is one we all should know about. ( )