All The Way Home

All the Way Home by Ann Tatlock
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Overall the story (stories) were decent. It felt like two books, almost like it could have been a series, but it was a two part book. The first half of the book took place with the two main characters as children living in southern California leading up to and during WWII. Sunny is a second generation Japanese American who has an incredibly loving and supportive family who feel they are as American as anyone else. Augie comes from a broken family and quickly comes to love Sunny's family when they quickly become best friends.

World War II erupts and Sunny's family is forced to leave their lives behind to live in Japanese internment camps. Augie is devastated as she had become so much a part of Sunny's family, she even thinks of herself as Japanese at heart.

Augie and Sunny's family lose contact and Auguie thinks they have abandoned her and is devastated by what she sees as betrayal.

Fast forward twenty something years and Sunny, now Helen, finds Augie and invites her to her home to write a magazine article about anti-civil rights Mississippi. Augie is shocked to learn that the invitation to Mississippi is from her childhood best friend; there is a weird twist there I won't spoil.

Augie is there to write a story about a school that prepares African Americans to register to vote. She meets a really great guy...blah blah blah, he turns out to be something completely different than she thought...blah, blah, blah...the KKK are everywhere, they are bad, horrible people. I do not mean to demean what happened there, it's disgusting, but the story dragged on too much for me to read every fine detail.

The second part started out good, but then I just lost interest. It could have been shortened substantially. I skimmed over many pages just trying to get to the end quickly.

Great basis for a story, just not as interesting as I think it could have been. And have I mentioned how much I HATE reading accents? It is one of the more annoying parts of this book.

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