Early Sunday Morning: The Pearl Harbor Diary of Amber Billows

The story is about Amber and her family. Her father is a newspaper reporter and gets relocated often, causing the family to have to move frequently and upsetting Amber since she has to constantly be staring at new schools.

Early in 1941 her father gets assigned to Hawaii and so the family moves yet again. A lot of the novel is spent showing the parties that they hold and the efforts her father makes to find sources of information for his article. Everything proceeds normally until the morning of December 7 which, as anyone familiar with history at all knows, was the day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

Another storyline has been going on since the family got to Hawaii and that is Amber's growing friendship with Kame, a Japanese-American who goes from best friend one day to a possibly suspicious enemy the next. This is a very complicated part of American history and one I cover in my section in Japan on the Japanese-American Internment Camps.

The immediate aftermath of the bombing, the weeks following and the reaction of the people is also quite interesting.

As with other books in the series there is a historical section. There are two references in that section, though, to jets and there were no jets at that time at all in anyone's army, either Axis or Allied. The Germans and the Japanese both had experimental jet planes they were working on but in 1941 neither country had a plane yet ready to fly.


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