Best Children's Books 2005: 'Eyes of the Emperor'

The shameful truth of the way the United States treated its Japanese-American civilians during WWII is now generally known. Much less known has been its treatment of its soldiers of Japanese ancestry. Salisbury begins his latest novel in his native Hawaii, just weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor, when Eddy Okubo lies about his age and enlists in the Army to prove that he is American, not a "Japanese problem." But when war breaks out, he and his friends are first segregated and then shipped to a Mississippi island to be subjects in a brutally humiliating experiment to train dogs to find and attack Japanese combatants?based on the wholly racist assumption that Japanese smell different from Caucasians. There have been a raft of terrific WWII novels published recently for teens; this one stands out?Kirkus described it as "[m]orally and psychologically complex, historically accurate and unforgettably gripping"?in its understated yet powerful approach to a little-known and peculiarly reprehensible chapter in U.S. military history.