Painting the Rainbow.

Gordon, Amy.  Painting the Rainbow.  Holiday House  2014  167p  $16.95  ISBN 978-0-8234-2525-9  ms/hs  Historical fiction  VG

Coming of age in the 1960s, Ivy and Holly are cousins who spend summers with their extended family at a lake house in New Hampshire. Writing through diary entries, the girls share their concerns about their families and how so many of the families’ problems seem to involve the death of their Uncle Jesse during World War Two.  Wrapped up with all of this are the Japanese internment camps during the war and one Kiyoshi Miori, a family visitor during the war years.     

I could not put this book down because it pulled me right back into the past, into my own youth in the 1960s.  Many of the problems the girls face -- pressures to excel, feeling like second-class citizens in your own family, family history that no one wants to talk about, and all of the other dynamics of spending time with one’s extended family.  As historical fiction goes, this was highly readable and I am certain that there is a readership out there for this book.

Summary: Coming of age in the 1960s, Ivy and Holly are cousins who spend summers with their extended family at a lake house in New Hampshire. Writing through diary entries, the girls share their concerns about their families and how so many of their problems seem to involve the death of their Uncle Jesse during World War Two.                  

Japanese internment camps-Fiction                     --Lynn Fisher