In the Heart of the Valley of Love

"An apocalyptic picture of America on the brink of civil disorder and social collapse" (New York Times). In the deteriorating LA of 2052, a young girl is forced by tragedy to venture from her secure environs into a world where survival takes precedence over all else.

Literature & Fiction

Kadohata,Cynthia

Literary

Penguin??Books

Glittering. That’s how Katie Takeshima’s sister, Lynn, makes everything seem. The sky is kira-kira because its color is deep but see-through at the same time. The sea is kira-kira for the same reason. And so are people’s eyes. When Katie and her family move from a Japanese community in Iowa to the Deep South of Georgia, it’s Lynn who explains to her why people stop them on the street to stare. And it’s Lynn who, with her special way of viewing the world, teaches Katie to look beyond tomorrow. But when Lynn becomes desperately ill, and the whole family begins to fall apart, it is up to Katie to find a way to remind them all that there is always something glittering—kira-kira—in the future. Luminous in its persistence of love and hope, Kira-Kira is Cynthia Kadohata’s stunning debut in middle-grade fiction.

Kira - Kira

Children's Books

Listening Library (Audio)

Twelve-year-old Sumiko feels her life has been made up of two parts: before Pearl Harbor and after it. The good part and the bad part. Raised on a flower farm in California, Sumiko is used to being the only Japanese girl in her class. Even when the other kids tease her, she always has had her flowers and family to go home to.Now, other Americans start to suspect that all Japanese people are spies for the emperor and Sumiko and her family find themselves being shipped to an internment camp in one of the hottest deserts in the United States. The vivid color of her previous life is gone forever, and now dust storms regularly choke the sky and seep into every crack of the military barrack that is her new “home.”Sumiko soon discovers that the camp is on an Indian reservation and that the Japanese are as unwanted there as they’d been at home. But then she meets a young Mohave boy who might just become her first real friend…. With searing insight and clarity, Newbery Medal—winning author Cynthia Kadohata explores an important and painful topic through the eyes of a young girl who yearns to belong. Weedflower is the story of the rewards and challenges of a friendship across the racial divide, as well as the based-on-real-life story of how the meeting of Japanese Americans and Native Americans changed the future of both.

Weedflower

Teen & Young Adult

Historical Fiction

Floating World

"Maks the debut of a luminious new voice in fiction."THE NEW YORK TIMESOlivia, the young narrator of this beautiful novel, and her Japanese-American family are constantly on the road, looking for a home in the 1950s. Then traveling becomes a kind of home, a place for her parents to work out their difficulties, in towns that barely linger in memory, hanging in the air among them as the part of a family history that reaches further back than they care to recall, but can't help remembering....

Ballantine Books

A NEW YORK TIMES Notable Book of the Year. "Magical...THE FLOATING WORLD is about families, coming of age, guilt, memory...It is also about being Japanese-American in the United States in the 1950's." --NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW.

The Floating World

United States

This first novel from a young Japanese-American writer describes the coming of age of the 12-year-old narrator, herself Japanese-American. The time is the early 50s and her family have taken to the road. Prejudice, marital problems and poverty are the motives for their travels.

Seker & Warburg

2052, America is deteriorating: water and gas are rationed, disease flourishes and the black market thrives. Written by the author of "The Floating World", this is a novel about possibilities, about finding your way in a world gone mad and about surviving when it hardly seems worth the effort.

TRAFALGAR SQUARE +

Cynthia Kadohata explores human relationships in a Los Angeles of the future, where rich and poor are deeply polarized and where water, food, and gas, not to mention education, cannot be taken for granted. There is an intimate, understated, even gentle quality to Kadohata's writing―this is not an apocalyptic dystopia―that makes it difficult to shrug off the version of the future embodied in her book.

In the Heart of the Valley of Love (California Fiction)

University of California Press

FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY. When Pearl Harbor is attacked, the lives of a Japanese-American girl and her family are thrown into chaos.

Weedflower (Turtleback School & Library Binding Edition)

Turtleback Books

Half a World Away

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Kadohata,Cynthia. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Kadohata,Cynthia

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Kadohata,Cynthia. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

In the Heart of the Valley of Love

Kira - Kira

Weedflower

Floating World

The Floating World

The Floating World

In the Heart of the Valley of Love

In the Heart of the Valley of Love (California Fiction)

Weedflower (Turtleback School & Library Binding Edition)

Half a World Away