Description: This heartbreaking manga, by an award-winning cartoonist, examines the history of Okinawa and its military occupation. An essential manga classic presented in English for the first time.
Brief description: Andrew Woodrow-Butcher is an editor, critic, and consultant with a career specializing in comics in school and public libraries. Andrew manages graphic collection development services for renowned comics shop The Beguiling Books & Art, where he also built their spin-off shop Little Island Comics, at the time the world's only comic book shop just for kids. His work for the Toronto Comic Arts Festival spanned a decade and focused on programming for kids and educators, and on building international comics partnerships. He has written about a wide variety of books for venues like Xtra!, Broken Pencil, Quill & Quire, CBC Kids, and Publishers Weekly.
Review Quotes: There's a lot of potential for this to be taught in high school and university classes as an examination of war, occupation, and tradition. Higa's characters are supremely well-developed for such short vignettes, and their motivations are well-defined for their actions. Higa's monumental work sits firmly among such other notable ruminations on history as Keiji Nakazawa's Barefoot Gen, Shigeru Mizuki's Showa, Art Spiegelman's Maus, and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis.-- "Booklist, Starred Review"