Yoshi Kobayash is a young fifteen year old girl living in Japan like many others when one night her life changes forever. The Doolittle regiment dumped napalm on her city, changing her life inexplicably–thousands are dead and her city is in ruins. The book opens with the courtship and marriage of Cam and Lacy in New York and then shifts to Japan where we meet Billy Reynolds, an American boy whose father designs public buildings in Japan. Billy’s mother gives him a camera for his birthday which is a central theme in this story. We then meet Kenji and Hana Kobayashi and their daughter, Yoshi.

Hetty and Sarah have grown up very differently. Hetty (“Handful”) was given to Sarah on her eleventh birthday as a slave. Sarah is from a wealthy family in pre Civil War South Carolina….one of the ‘first families’ in fact. Though she tries to free Hetty, her parents remind her that she is expected to own salves and she must simply make the best of things. So the two girls who are similar in age grow up together. The story of these two girls is told in two separate narratives. We learn a little about each of the girls families and upbringing as the story goes along. Sarah and Hetty grow…