WHILE I WAS AWAY was her debut memoir and is followed by DREAM, ANNIE, DREAM, her first work of fiction. Agent: Penny Moore and Erin Files, Aevitas Creative Management. Waka’s also been awarded the USJapan Foundation and EngageAsia’s 2019 Elgin Heinz Outstanding Teacher Award for her groundbreaking endeavors in teaching about USJapan relations to high school students in Japan. This personal story offers readers a glimpse at Japanese and American cultural differences while stressing that what makes things different is also what makes them unique. The text is peppered with Japanese words as well as hiragana, katakana, and kanji, for which Brown explains alphabet and character differences. Obaasama, widowed young, maintains the same hard exterior that she employed in raising her own nine children, and Brown learns that Obaasama’s own abusive father-who once burned Obaasama with a branding iron-informed her grandmother’s toughcaretaking style. Once in Japan, however, Brown slowly begins to find her footing, including shared interests-Twix candy bars-with her brusque grandmother. Brown, the first in her family to be born in America, is upset by the prospect of leaving her Kansas friends behind-and attending Japanese school-for more than an entire summer. When she was 12, Brown’s Japanese-born parents decided to send her to live with her grandmother-Obaasama-in Tokyo for five months. Brown’s debut explores an experience of having one foot in two cultures in an age-appropriate memoir.
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