How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?Visit Kimiko Guthrie's website.
The title of the book refers to the place where the main trauma of the story occurred – so the location and point in time from which everything ripples out. During WWII, when Japanese Americans were made to leave their homes and give up their possessions to be imprisoned for an indefinite period of time in confinement centers, known as the internment, or “Camp” as people referred to it then, the barracks were arranged into numbered blocks. Block Seventeen is the number of the block where our main character Akiko’s mother was held as a child, and where she witnessed something horrible that haunts her to this day. So, in a way, Akiko’s mother has never really left Block Seventeen. Akiko, a mixed race woman in her mid-thirties who is attempting to...[read on]
Q&A with Kimiko Guthrie.
--Marshal Zeringue
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