Farewell to Manzanar by James D. Houston and Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston

I chose the topic of setting and mood for the part of the book that I read. In Farewell to Manzanar by James D. Houston and Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, there is a part where Jeanne Wakatsuki was in kindergarten and living with her family. Jeanne’s father wasn’t taken away yet so they still lived together. While they were all living together they lived in Ocean Park near Santa Monica in a “big frame house with a brick fireplace, a block back from the beach. We were the only Japanese family in the neighborhood. Papa liked it that way. He didn’t want to be labeled or grouped by anyone” page 26. It shows that she liked her life before her father was taken away. When her father was taken away from her family, her mother’s first concern was to keep the family together. After her father was taken, they moved and they eventually, “The house we lived in was nothing more than a shack, a barracks with a single plank was and rough wooden floors, like the cheapest kind of migrant workers’ housing.” Page 27. After their dad was taken, the family had a rough time. Later in the book, they get forced to live in one barracks that houses 12 people. All the families that were in the barracks were having trouble space wise. The barracks were terribly small. but made for too many people.  The family was struggling with fitting into the barracks and they had to deal with each other. The people also found a way to make the bad living conditions into no so bad ones. The people shaped their thinking of the community and the houses they lived in. Instead of making their lives even more miserable by beating themselves down, they started to notice the beauty in the nature around them.

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