Kame sounds like a much more interesting character than Amber, to be honest.Īmber’s dad befriends the owner of a local bookstore, which I’m on board with, and plays golf with a local lieutenant and ends up inviting them both to Thanksgiving dinner. Well, that’s certainly not stereotypical at all, then! Kame is apparently pretty popular at school, so Amber tags along with her. Kame’s family is “traditionally Japanese,” which apparently means they eat tofu with chopsticks, decorate their house with samurai swords, play the samisen and sing Japanese songs after dinner, and Kame’s mother never speaks and favours the boys. When Amber starts school, she meets a Japanese girl in her grade named Kame Arata, and Kame invites her over to eat dinner with the family. There’s something to think about next time you board a flight in cattle-class and have to eat a $19 sandwich that tastes like it may actually be from 1941. Because this is one of the books set more recently, we do get some interesting details on air travel in 1941, with the jealousy-inducing detail that dinner is served in an actual lounge with real china and crystal tableware. Fair enough, I suppose there really isn’t a neat way to do that. But later we learn that Amber is twelve and has only lived in four places, which doesn’t seem to be that extreme, though I imagine your average 12-year-old probably feels differently.Īmber’s parents throw a lot of dinner parties that serve as a nice way to get some exposition to us in the way of adults talking about current events and the trend of isolationism in American politics prior to the Pearl Harbor attack. His voice is so similar that almost all of his female characters end up sounding very similar, which bugs me a lot, but whatever.Īmber’s father is a newspaper reporter who has to move his family around quite a bit, though it’s never fully explained why he has to move so much.

This is another Barry Denenberg, because I figured while I was doing World War Two I may as well hit another one of the lowlights. This is one of my least favourite Dear Americas, but I’ll plug through it as it’s short.īook: Early Sunday Morning: The Pearl Harbor Diary of Amber Billows, Hawaii, 1941.

Early sunday morning by barry denenberg