This is not really a mystery of the East,since it is not much of a mystery and is set in the West. The title of this book is the name of an invented internment camp for Japanese-Americans where they were incarcerated during World War II. It is modeled after one actual such camp, Amache, located in eastern Colorado.
The reason it is hard to consider this book a murder mystery, even though a heinous murder is committed as a part of the plot, is because there is very little detective work here and no detective, just a county sheriff. Rather, this is a vehicle for exposing attitudes of rural Americans during the war toward the internees, the war itself and each other. The point of view is expressed by a 13 year old girl, Rennie, daughter of a sugar beet farmer, Loyal Stroud, and his wife. They have an older daughter living by herself in Denver and a son who is in the war. They live in the town of Ellis, not too far from Tallgrass.
The pace of the story is slow, almost plodding, with digressions that fill in some points about rural life in the 40s. It does end in a swirl of plot twists that speed the ending to a meaningful climax. The writing is plain and clear, relying less on wonderfully descriptive language than on a precision for details of moments and little snippets of society that accurately convey the feeling of those times. Examples of the latter include the mention of chiclets gum, the 30s movie idols Clark Gable and Carol Lombard, and the way the teens of that time spoke “jive.”
Sandra Dallas, the author, has good control of the characters, letting them emerge from her depictions of their daily life and the way they deal with crises. There are two major themes to this story: Racism and the potential for brutality of men toward women. There seem to be two types of men, most of them caricatures. Type one is the racist, sexist domineering male. Type two is the decent citizen, best portrayed by Loyal Stroud who is the sole exception to being a caricature. He is aptly compared to Atticus Finch in “To Killing a Mockingbird” whose plot outlines are very close to the story’s. There are also two types of women, the strong and the victimized, paired with the men as one would expect.
Being the son of Japanese-Americans who were imprisoned in Topaz, Utah, some of this story was hard for me to take as I grew very angry over passages that were familiar to me, not from my personal experience but from what I knew Americans of my ancestry to have endured, including my parents. But the Japanese-American experience in the camp is far from being a feature of this story. None of the internees are introduced by name until over a third of the way through the book. No, the fate of the Japanese-Americans is more of a backdrop to the central themes noted above: necessary for the racism and integral to the brutality.
I enjoyed reading it, but it is no “To Kill a Mockingbird” perhaps not a fair comparison, given the lofty level of Harper Lee’s work.
Ken Tokuno September, 2009