Pub Date: March 31, 2026
Lexile Code: 0000
Features: Dust Cover, Price on Product
Target Age Group: 07 to 10
Physical Info: 0.50" H x 9.20" L x 11.20" W ( 1.20 lbs) 48 pages
BISAC Categories:
Juvenile Fiction | Social Themes | Prejudice Racism and Colorism | Historical | United States 20th Century | United States 21st Century
Description:
A breathtaking reverso poem about two girls--separated by barbed wire, connected across generations.
In Barbed Wire Between Us, a single poem holds two lives, separated by decades yet bound by the same stretch of barbed wire.
Read forward, a Japanese American girl is uprooted and sent to an incarceration camp during World War II, her world reduced to dust, distance, and longing. Read in reverse, and the poem transforms: now a Latina girl stands in that same place, detained generations later, her story echoing across time.
With language as spare as it is powerful, Mia Wenjen shapes a reverso poem that reveals how history can fold in on itself--how loss, resilience, and hope repeat in new forms. Violeta Encarnación's evocative artwork deepens the emotional landscape, illuminating both the quiet tenderness and the stark realities of life behind the wire.
Together, they create a book that reads like a mirror held up to the past--and the present.
A luminous and unflinching meditation on memory, injustice, and the fragile promise of belonging, Barbed Wire Between Us lingers long after the final line--asking not only what happened, but what we choose to see, and what we dare to change.
Review Quotes:
★ "A haunting dual narrative of imprisonment and family separation." Starred Reveiw
--Publishers Weekly