The bridges Yuri built

Williams, making her picture book debut with a personal-feeling work about her great-grandmother, traces how Japanese American activist Yuri Kochiyama (1921--2014) became a civil rights ally, documentarian, and organizer. Born in San Pedro, Calif., Kochiyama was 20 when the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor occurred, after which her father was violently questioned and her family was sent to an Arkansas incarceration camp. There, she met Nisei soldier Bill Kochiyama and began corresponding with him when he went off to war. When other soldiers mentioned feeling lonely, the letter-writing campaign she organized reached thousands. After the war, the couple moved to Harlem, where Yuri joined the civil rights movement ("She knew how it felt to be denied freedom because of the color of her skin"). She attended meetings and protests, housed anyone passing through, and wrote letters to political prisoners, per a lengthy author's note, "making connections between movements and identifying common sources of oppression." Airbrush-style illustrations incorporate images of letters and envelopes, emphasizing the power of Yuri's correspondence in her activism. An author's note concludes. Ages 5--9. (Apr.)

A celebration of the life and legacy of a Japanese American Civil Rights activist. Rather than directly urge readers to adopt her forebear Yuri Kochiyama as a role model, the author simply relates select experiences in her great-grandmother's life that turned her into an activist and that portray her in action. Born in California and imprisoned in an Arkansas incarceration camp during World War II, Yuri formed a group of correspondents to write letters of support to Japanese American soldiers. Facing racial discrimination after the war as well, she then leveraged that organizing experience while quietly working her way into the inner circles of the Civil Rights Movement--she was close enough to Malcolm X to cradle his head in her lap moments after he was shot--and going on to be a freedom fighter, building bridges connecting many social causes. "For Yuri," the author writes in her afterword, "solidarity was not an ideal but an embodied, necessary practice." Images of her--a slight figure in owlish eyeglasses, raising a defiant fist, facing a New York shop window with signs reading "No Japs" and "Colored entrance in rear," waving protest banners, hosting meetings and open houses in her Harlem apartment, and standing here with fellow activists and there alone at her ironing board writing letters--serve to underscore her lifelong energy and dedication. Eloquent and inspiring. (Picture-book biography. 7-9) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.