A Family in Wartime: A Review of Three Years and Eight Months

A month ago I highlighted the winners of the 2013 Skipping Stones Honor Awards, given to outstanding multicultural and nature books published in the previous year. Although published in 2013, Icy Smith and Jennifer Kindert’s Three Years and Eight Months (East-West Discovery Press) earned a place on the award list. (Publishers can submit advanced reading copies for consideration in an earlier year, and for a small press title like Three Years and Eight Months, it offers an opportunity for pre-release buzz.) This is a well-deserved prize for a story about a little-known episode in the Second World War, and one based on the experience of author Smith’s father and grandmother. Choi is ten years old when Japanese forces invade the British colony where his family lives in December 1941, shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Immediately, the Japanese take away the women, including Choi’s mother, to work as slaves in military installations and elsewhere. (Many of the women are sexually abused in that situation, but Smith refers to that fate only indirectly, by mentioning toward the end of the story that, “Many feel shame for socializing with Japanese soldiers and end up becoming Buddhist nuns.” Smith’s grandmother was one of them.) Left behind to live with his uncle, Choi and his best friend, Taylor, volunteer to work at a Japanese military base in order to have enough to eat, and ultimately, to help Choi’s uncle and Taylor’s father in their work for a resistance organization. When Choi and Taylor steal medical supplies from the base, they do not know that those supplies help to rescue shot-down Allied airmen and escaped prisoners of war.

Narrated in prose from Choi’s first person point of view, Three Years and Eight Months offers the perspective of a child living under occupation who finds in resistance a key to survival. Through words and pictures, the book portrays a close friendship between two boys who help each other through a difficult time. Realistic, evocative watercolor illustrations are a distinguishing feature of East-West Discovery Press’s picture books for older readers, and this one is no exception. Illustrator Kindert, of Thai heritage, captures the characters’ expressions and shows their maturation from age ten to fifteen, as well as their increasing emaciation and the raggedness of their clothing as the war drags on.  Following the text is an informative afterword with black-and-white photos of Hong Kong during the Japanese occupation.