We Are Not Free

San Francisco, 1942. Fourteen Japanese American teenagers — friends, rivals, lovers, strangers — as Executive Order 9066 rounds up their community and sends them to internment camps. Chee gives each of the fourteen a chapter in their own voice, so the novel is not one person's experience of internment but a whole community's — the specific ways that imprisonment fractures and also cements relationships, the different choices people make under impossible conditions, the specific loss of the city they grew up in. National Book Award finalist. The most formally ambitious YA novel about Japanese American internment and the one that most completely refuses to reduce its subjects to their victimhood — each of the fourteen is fully alive before the order arrives and remains fully alive inside the camps. Essential complement to Obasan and They Called Us Enemy on the internment shelf.