We Are Not Free by Traci Chee
(2020) 384 pages

Final Rating: 9/10

Blurb:
“All around me, my friends are talking, joking, laughing. Outside is the camp, the barbed wire, the guard towers, the city, the country that hates us.

We are not free.
But we are not alone.”

We Are Not Free, is the collective account of a tight-knit group of young Nisei, second-generation Japanese American citizens, whose lives are irrevocably changed by the mass U.S. incarcerations of World War II.

Fourteen teens who have grown up together in Japantown, San Francisco.
Fourteen teens who form a community and a family, as interconnected as they are conflicted.
Fourteen teens whose lives are turned upside down when over 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry are removed from their homes and forced into desolate incarceration camps.
In a world that seems determined to hate them, these young Nisei must rally together as racism and injustice threaten to pull them apart.

Review:
My biggest question regarding this book is: how is it so underrated?

There are a few things that make a story that I find most important. 1) Characters. I need to love and empathize with the characters, they need to be real; 2) Good writing. Any bad grammar or cringy, mundane lines are a no for me; 3) Solid pacing, not too fast that it’s overwhelming, but not too slow so that it becomes boring and dull; 4) A believable world and setting.

Already, in less than 20 pages, Traci Chee has built a world with characters that make me feel and believe. They aren’t bland characters that I can’t bring myself to emphasize; no, they are real with relationships and a story. The beginning and the characters remind me of the opening of The Outsiders. I already know how hard it is to achieve a few engrossing, complex characters, but to create fourteen? That’s incredible.

Chee’s writing is very poetic and detailed, with a range of abilities that I wish I had at the moment. Every paragraph is like a sponge, holding words full of emotion and knowledge that only needs to be squeezed out by the reader. She made my heart ache for characters who felt trapped and abandoned by a country that forced them into concentration camps, killed and injured thousands of their race, and still asked if they were loyal to their country.

“See, we don’t got liberty, we don’t got property, but you better believe we’ve got the Great American Right to die for a country that doesn’t want us.”

The pacing was near perfect, being slow enough that I could absorb the personality of each of the fourteen narrators, and yet fast enough that I was hooked onto almost every page. 
The world was described so well that I felt the suffocation of being a Japanese person during World War II, and how the violence destroyed lives, families, and dreams. It showed me the beauty and disgusting sides of humanity.