Review of Garden of Stones by Sophie Littlefield

When we think of internment camps and WWII, we don’t think of California, Arizona and Utah, but we should. Sophie Littlefield’s upcoming book, Garden of Stones, which moves between WWII and the 1970’s, draws us into this shameful chapter of US history after the bombing of Pearl Harbor—the rounding up, financial ruin, and forcible detention of Japanese Americans in desolate camps. I remember attending an exhibit in the early 70’s of photographs and artwork from the camps—a book of that exhibit is still around, Executive Order 9066—because my father was an historian and he’d helped put it together. I had a jarring sense that this piece didn’t work in my limited teen framework of history. How could we have done this? It stank so much of the behavior on the other side of the Atlantic we’d fought to stop.

Any good book set in this particular historical moment would be worthwhile. There have been several earlier ones such as Farewell to Manzanar. Sophie Littlefield’s novel does an outstanding job of depicting a heartbreaking view of this national failure of conscience. For example, she interweaves into her plot the orphanages that had been relocated to the camp. Did we really fear the espionage of infants so much that we endangered their well being in order to lock them up?

But Sophie’s book accomplishes more than a vivid reminder of this chapter of history. Littlefield portrays three generations of women, a mother, daughter and granddaughter, of such depth and idiosyncratic character that it would not matter when or where the book was set, we would read on to feel these three lives vibrate with tragedy, inner strength, mental delusion, and peculiar joys. Littlefield’s entwining of these particular lives within the historical details makes for smart, mind-bending reading that you can’t put down. There’s a murder mystery at its plot center, but this book is so full of human crisis and coping that the murder becomes only one of many pieces broken loose by this tale’s full-spate river. We are compelled to consider the rights and wrongs of actions so much more anguished and subtle than simply why our government locked up law-abiding citizens (valuable as that reminder alone would be). Garden of Stones tugs us along through mental illness, rape, sexual abuse, bigotry, and the ambiguous but powerful bonds between mothers and daughters. Perhaps most of all, this book provides a nuanced portrayal of the nature of forgiveness and acceptance.