With a brisk narrative style full of lively dialogue, Uchida writes of two decades of American life thrown into sharp contrast during a 1930's family visit to Japan when she and her sister felt totally foreign. The author's experiences as a girl growing up in Berkeley, California, were thoroughly American; she had a bicultural childhood, as well, because of the unseen thread she describes as binding her parents to the Japan they left behind long before World War I. Her account of the family's forced internment in 1942, just as she was completing her university degree, unfolds within the context of their previous life as U.S. citizens. Uchida emphasizes her youth, the internment and a bit about early vocational attempts, rather than her development as a writer and her successful career yielding more than two dozen published books. Two of Uchida's novels for children concern the internment: JOURNEY TO TOPAZ (Scribner's, 1971) and JOURNEY HOME (Atheneum, 1978). Several of her other novels fictionalize Japanese-American California life during the 1930's. (Ages 9-14)