Thin Wood Walls by David Patneaude
WAW 2006 Book Nominee (Gr. 6-8)
December 29, 2006
Thin Wood Walls is a story about prejudice and the
effects of war. Although the characters are fictional, the story
itself is based on actual events that occurred to
Japanese-Americans in the United States during World War II.
Joe Hanada is 11 years old and lives in White River Valley near
Seattle, Washington. The story begins right before Japan attacks
Pearl Harbor in 1941. Joe's neighborhood is a farming community
where most of the people of Japanese heritage help in the fields.
But Joe's father is a college professor. After the war starts, the
FBI takes Joe's father away. Then, anti-Japanese sentiment causes
the government to round up all the Japanese-Americans and put them
in internment caps far away from their homes.
Joe's peaceful life of playing basketball and marbles with his
friend, Ray, changes to life as a prisoner in a boring, tiny room
inside a fenced and guarded compound. Joe deals with his worry over
his father's imprisonment and his brother's anger by writing haiku,
Japanese poetry. Traditional haiku is typically distinguished by a
pattern of three lines, with 5, 7, and 5 syllables on the
corresponding lines respectively.
During the course of the story, Joe conveys his feelings of
being ousted, of being deemed an outcast. He describes how
people who are your friends one day, shun you the next. And he
describes how people judge others because of their ethnicity or
racial background:
Blood spills, cherry-red / From brown bodies. Do colors /
Matter, in the end? (page 226, Thin Wood Walls)
