Silver Like Dust: One Family’s Story of America’s Japanese Internment

Between 1942 and 1945 110,00 people of Japanese descent were sent to internment camps in the U.S. Grant tells the story of her own grandparents, who were “relocated” from their Los Angeles home to Wyoming’s Heart Mountain Relocation Center. Unfortunately, Grant, an English instructor at Penn State and recipient of the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship in creative nonfiction, has chosen to tell this story in a segmented fashion that fails to cohere; mixing her account of getting to know her grandmother, her grandmother’s revelations of her own history, and tidbits of historical context diminishes emphasis and immediacy. Ultimately, the narrative becomes tedious (“A runner, a woman in an all-pink Nike outfit, approaches on the walking path, and we switch to single file to allow her to pass”) and dissonant (“Rommel ravaged North Africa and marched toward Cairo”). (Jan.)