Camp nine

the long version

"On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the military to ban anyone from certain areas of the country, with primary focus on the West Coast. Eventually the order was used to relocate 120,000 people of Japanese descent to internment camps such as the Rohwer Relocation Center in remote Desha County, Arkansas ... The novel's narrator, Chess Morton, lives in tiny Rook, Arkansas. Her days are quiet and secluded until the appearance of a relocation center built for what was in effect the imprisonment of thousands of Japanese Americans. Chess's life becomes intertwined with those of two young internees and an American soldier mysteriously connected to her mother's past. As Chess watches the struggles and triumphs of these strangers and sees her mother seek justice for these people who came briefly and involuntarily to call the Arkansas Delta their home, she discovers surprising and disturbing truths about her family's painful past."--Jacket.