House of the Red Fish (Readers Circle (Laurel-Leaf)) [Kindle Edition]

Graham Salisbury (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From School Library Journal

Grade 6-9–This sequel to Under the Blood-Red Sun (Delacorte, 1994) continues the story of Tomi Nakaji, a Japanese American living on the island of Oahu. It's 1943 and Tomi, now 13, is forced into the role of the man of the house. His father has been arrested and imprisoned; his grandfather has also been taken away. All people of Japanese descent are suspect in the virulent racism of the times. Vigilantes stalk the streets, enforcing a curfew. Tomi decides to keep hope and faith alive that his father will return by raising Papa's fishing boat, the Taiyo Maru, a sampan that was sunk by the army. His former friend, Keet Wilson, has become his nemesis, bullying, stealing from, and terrorizing Tomi. Other haoles, or white people, however, become allies in his ultimately successful struggle to raise the boat and look toward a better future. The nearly impossible task is accomplished largely through Tomi's determination and perseverance and his ingenious approaches to the problem. Salisbury paints the tropical setting with vivid details. He writes with balance of the ways in which war touches people, creating characters with fully realized motivations. It is not necessary to have read the first book, as the author seamlessly brings his audience up to date. Give this to readers who enjoyed Rodman Philbrick's The Young Man and the Sea (Scholastic, 2004), another story with an ocean setting and a fiercely determined boy's coming of age.–Connie Tyrrell Burns, Mahoney Middle School, South Portland, ME
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Gr. 5-8. Like its prequel, Under the Blood-Red Sun (2005), which won a Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction, this novel tells of the hardship and vicious prejudice suffered by Japanese Americans in Hawaii, but it also conveys a sense of community that cuts across race and generations. After his father is deported to an internment camp following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Tomi Nakaji, 14, determines to raise Papa's fishing boat, which had been sunk by the army. Tomi's best friend, Billy, who is a haole (white), helps him, as do the boys' Hawaiian friends and many of their family members--including Tomi's grouchy grandfather, who has returned from the camps. The rescue effort, which works as a metaphor for hope and reconciliation, is rooted in hands-on facts of how, together, the people use pontoons, air compressors, rope, and just plain muscle to bring the heavy boat back into the world. Many readers, even those who don't enjoy historical fiction, will like the portrayal of the work and the male camaraderie. For more books about Japanese Americans during and following Pearl Harbor suggest Salisbury's Eyes of the Emperor (2005) and Harry Mazer's A Boy No More (2004). Hazel Rochman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Format: Kindle Edition
• File Size: 1588 KB
• Publisher: Laurel Leaf (December 24, 2008)
• Sold by: Random House Digital, Inc.
• Language: English
• ASIN: B001ODEQ3O
• Text-to-Speech: Not enabled
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #215,732 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
  • #21 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Fiction > Children's Fiction > People & Places > Multicultural Stories > Asian & Asian American

More About the Author

I hope what gives my books their sense of authenticity, other than the natural inculcation of the island physical and cultural landscape, which ends up in my sentences by osmosis, is my use of language. In Hawaii we often speak what we call pidgin English, a kind of tropical patois. For example, in Standard English one would say, "I am going home." In Hawaiian pidgin it would be, "I going home." A simple thing, but over the course of a novel it becomes a bigger thing, a part of a character's being. It resonates. Syntax, too, creates that feeling of authenticity. It comes to me naturally, thank heaven. I don't have to work at it because I simply hear it. If I had to fake it I'd be laughed off the face of the earth. So, growing up in the islands was my gift. My writing is just me spewing it back.

As for the work itself, I'm big on certain issues having to do with boys and growing up. I guess this is so because of my own fractured upbringing. Much of who I am is self-imposed. I am my choices, and I have chosen to walk a certain path. Important to me are such qualities as honesty, friendship, honor, loyalty, integrity, courage, work and passion. Life for anyone is a series of choices, and I hope that fact gets some play in my books. Luckily for me, I have made some good choices. It could have been different. I could have taken pride in the wrong moves, as many boys do. It's cool to be tough. Beating the spit out of someone is good for the rep. It's honorable to attack someone who "disrespects" you by, perhaps, accidentally bumping into you (Hey! You like I broke your face or what?). Right. I could have fallen into that mindset. But I didn't, and I lay all credit to that on one man: James Monroe Taylor, my high school headmaster.

At the end of my sixth grade year my mom saw the light - she kicked my sorry okole out of the house and sent me to boarding school. It was in the middle of Parker Ranch on the Big Island of Hawaii, and was the most precious gift she ever could have given me. I loved it. For the first time in my life I had something I really, really, really needed: limits. It was like being at boot camp. Mr. Taylor, as part of his training, took us into his home in small groups and lectured us on the good qualities of life, all that stuff that is now so important to me: friendship, honor, etc. Of course, it was my duty at that time to laugh it off. That fat old man was out of his head. But his words stuck, and because they did, whenever I was presented with a sticky situation I was able to fall back on that foundation and use it to make the better choice. My mother and Mr. Taylor. My hat's off to both of them.

In my career as an author, I've spoken to a bazillion kids, mostly in grades 6 through 8. It's been fun, truly. But I had an epiphany one day, and my newest creation, Calvin Coconut, came to be because of it.

I once spoke to a large group of fifth and sixth graders in a huge gymnasium, and was leaving the school, heading down the hall with the teacher who had invited me. "There's a third grade teacher here in our school who just loves your books," she said as we walked, "and she asked me to ask you if you would be willing to just stop by her class and say hi to her kids. They know about you, too, because she read them one of your short stories."

"Sure," I said. I'd never spoken to third graders. It might be fun.

Boy, was it.

The third grade teacher and every one of her students were literally glowing with excitement, having the AUTHOR in their classroom.

They gathered around, sitting in a semi-circle on the floor. I sat in a chair next to the teacher, who reached over and picked up a plate of cookies.

The kids all leaned forward, eyes bright as a thousand suns, rascally twinkles in them.

"Would you like to try one of the cookies we made in class?" she said.

I didn't, but I was on duty. "Uh, sure," I said.

She pushed the plate closer.

The kids did a magnificent job of stuffing back their giggles as I reached out and picked up a yummy-looking, but - I could tell -- very fake, cookie.

The teacher grinned and I played along and pretended to bite into it. "Bleecck!" I spat, and the kids roared, as if it were the funniest thing they'd ever seen in their lives.

And that's what got me: those beautiful, beautiful faces, all looking up at me in pure delight.

I ended up telling them a story of when I got stuck in a mass of mud, a story I love to tell, and they laughed, and laughed, and laughed.

I left that school a new man, and vowed then and there that someday I was going to expand my writing to include this group. Because I loved those faces and yearn to absorb that energy.

I also wanted to include this younger audience because teachers have told me many, many times that they just can't get their boys interested in reading. I know of their plight. I was one of those boys. I read only one book on my own in all my elementary school years: TARZAN OF THE APES, by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

So Calvin Coconut and I have a job to do. Call Calvin Graham Salisbury light, because I'm bringing real life situations and themes for discussion into every Calvin book, just like I do in my books for older readers. I won't get heavy, I won't get edgy, and I won't be gratuitous. None of this is about me. It's about every kid out there today who is just like the wandering fool I was. Besides the simple enjoyment of writing, my aim is simple: to build trust and turn boys into lifetime readers.

I finally became a reader at thirty. That's how hard it is to get some boys to read. I'd like to join all my very fine writer/teacher/librarian/parent colleagues in changing that a bit. Reading changes everything. Boy, does it!

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One fish, two fish, house of the red fish, house of the blue fish, August 8, 2006

By 

E. R. Bird "Ramseelbird" (Manhattan, NY) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: House of the Red Fish (Hardcover)

Sequels are tricky beasties and any author that attempts one is going to have to wrangle with a variety of problems. On the one hand, they have to satisfy their core fan base. The people who adored the earlier book and presumably clamored for a sequel in the first place. Then you have the new crop of readers. This is especially true with children's fiction. Kids grow up and often abandon the authors they loved when they were young (at least through adolescence). In 1994 Graham Salisbury wrote the award winning "Under the Blood-Red Sun". Now, twelve years later, he has come out with a long-awaited sequel, "House of the Red Fish". Fortunately, Salisbury's earlier title is so well-known that the requisite fan-base is already in place and ready. However, there's yet another problem with writing sequels. They have to be able to stand on their own. If you absolutely have to have read the previous book, then your sequel, nice as it is, is going to collapse under its own weight. And weighty books of this nature don't win awards. I, personally, had never read "Under the Blood-Red Sun", so I felt that I was in a pretty good position to determine how well "House of the Red Fish" stood on its own two feet. The advantage to having never read a work by an author like Graham Salisbury is that his talents have a tendency whop you upside the head and leave you wanting more. "House of the Red Fish" is everything an author would want out of a title. Consider this puppy a contender.

Tomi is still dealing with the fact that his father and grampa are interned far from home merely because they are of Japanese ancestry. It's 1943 and America is at war with Japan, many of its white citizens terrified of their Asian neighbors. Living on Honolulu, Tomi and his best friend Billy go to school and try to avoid the nasty bully Keet, who (by awful coincidence) just happens to be the son of his mother's employers. Then Tomi comes up with a crazy plan. It happens while he and Billy are staring at his father's underwater sampan fishing boat, sunk not long after the attack on Pearl Harbor. If Tomi can raise this boat and fix it up, he may have a chance at having it in working condition when his father is finally released from his internment. The only problem is that Keet knows of the plan and will do everything in his power to stop Tomi and his friends. Worse still, raising the boat might mean putting his family's home and livelihood in danger. But when Grampa Joji is released from his imprisonment, Tomi finds an unlikely ally in helping him achieve his goal.

The characters in this book are remarkable. And the best of these, without a doubt, is Grampa. He's a cranky crochety old man with a single-minded tenacity that the reader grows to adore. I personally am going to adopt his standard phrase of "Confonnit" into my own vocabulary. Grampa has a great sense of pride, worth, and history. Salisbury complicates things nicely, however, when he has Grampa repeatedly give some of the family's chickens, eggs, tomatoes, lettuce, string beans, and fish to their landowners, the nasty Wilsons. Salisbury doesn't shy away from complexity. I mean, Billy's pretty straightforwardly super. Ditto Billy's family. But Tomi has his doubts and requisite crises of faith once in a while. And as for villains, Keet is marvelous. By the end of the book you begin to think that if someone doesn't give that punk a swift kick in the butt then you're going to have to do it personally. I did find that the oddest thing about reading this book without having so much as glanced at its predecessor was that I had very little idea of who belonged to what race. Billy's white and Tomi's of Japanese ancestry. Check. Got it. But how about their friends Mose and Rico? Are they Filipino? Of Hawaiian ancestry? It didn't much matter to the story, but it would have been nice to get a little clarification.

As a writer, Salisbury seems to be utterly in control of each and every scene in this book. Yes, it's a little long, but I can't imagine removing so much as a sentence. Everything fits here. The people. The events. And definitely the climax. The tension really escalates by the end of the book too. I kept finding myself nervously counting the number of pages left against how far our heroes were in their plans. I actually found myself hoping that Keet and his lackeys wouldn't show up and that maybe if I read fast enough I could beat them to the end. Not to give anything away, but no such luck. Salisbury's grasp of Hawaiian Pidjin is also superb. I've a friend born and raised in Honolulu (she attended Punahou, Keet's school in this book) who once told me that her mother would severely punish her if she ever heard her daughter utter casual Pidjin words or phrases. I wonder what her mom would have thought of the Glossary of terms in the back then.

Works of historical fiction tend to suffer from a dire fate: They're humorless. Dry dull titles without a spark of wit or whimsy to save their soul. I expected this of "House of the Red Fish", frankly. Somehow 280-some page tomes always look like they'll be deadly serious. How wrong I was. Salisbury's a great writer, yes. But he's so great partly because he lets, for lack of a better term, his boys be boys. When Keet decides to invade Billy's bomb shelter there a wonderful moment where the reader knows what Keet doesn't... that the shelter is chock full of nasty centipedes. Oh, that's good stuff. And the nice thing is that even when the plot is turning dire and our heroes have to raise this boat as soon as they can, characters still play jokes on one another, laugh, and have a good time. The fact that you're having a good time right alongside them just happens to be a nice bonus.

So the good news is that I'm a Graham Salisbury convert. The bad news is that I don't want to wait another twelve years to continue Tomi's story. I comfort myself with knowing that since kids today still read and love "Under the Blood-Red Sun", I'm sure they'll love both this book and any others that Salisbury happens to come out with in the course of his lifetime. It will be worth the wait.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Exploring the Nuances of Prejudice, August 2, 2006

By 

Bruce Black "Wordswimmer" (Florida) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: House of the Red Fish (Library Binding)

Salisbury's newest book, House of the Red Fish, is a masterful exploration of the nuances of prejudice, touching on many of the issues (honor, courage, friendship, and the bond between fathers and sons) that Salisbury has probed in his earlier work.

The attack on Pearl Harbor didn't only steal Tomi's father and grandfather from his life (they were arrested after the attack). It stole his dream of fishing with his father on his father's boat, the Taiyo Maru, which is sitting now underwater, sunk by the Navy under suspicion that it and its owner might aid invading Japanese forces.

Tomi wants to bring the boat back to the surface and dry it out so that it's ready to sail out to sea when his father returns home from prison. Tomi also wants to make his absent father proud... to carry on the Japanese tradition of sons honoring their fathers.

To succeed, Tomi must persevere in the face of trouble just like the koi-the fish that symbolizes masculinity and strength because it can swim upstream against strong currents.

But it's not easy for Tomi to remain loyal to his family's Japanese heritage or his father's admonitions not to fight, not to shame the family, especially when the red paper koi that his mother raises on a bamboo pole above the roof to celebrate Tango-no-Sekku (Boy's Festival) is destroyed.

Tomi's relationships with his friends, a mix of haole (white), Portugese, Hawaiian, and Japanese boys, ring true to life as they fend off attacks by a white-only gang, and work together to raise Tomi's father's boat from the canal.

In the end, House of the Red Fish is a book about the joy and bonds of friendship, as well as what it truly means to look beneath a person's skin color and speech patterns to understand what he's truly made of.

It's also a story about one boy's struggle to live with integrity in the face of enormous prejudice, while offering eloquent testimony to the courage and loyalty displayed by Japanese Americans during a difficult time in American history.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tomi and Billy Face New Battles, August 24, 2006

By 

Jane Murphy Romjue (Honolulu, Hawaii) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: House of the Red Fish (Hardcover)

Here it is, HOUSE OF THE RED FISH, the eagerly awaited sequel to Graham Salisbury's UNDER THE BLOOD-RED SUN. Readers already acquainted with Tomi and Billy (and their neighbor but "enemy" Keet Wilson) will delight in renewing friendships and going on more adventures in Salisbury's newest novel. HOUSE OF THE RED FISH opens with a brief flashback to September 1941, but the next chapter takes us to March 1943. Tomi Nakaji and Billy Davis, still best friends, are now ninth graders at Roosevelt High. Salisbury makes readers very aware of the ravages of the attack on Pearl Harbor and the way life in Hawaii has changed in the interim for everyone, but especially for Japanese Americans like narrator Tomi and his family. The setting details subtly include many aspects of life in Hawaii during World War II: the boys get stopped, asked for their ID's, and warned that they should also have their gas masks with them; barbed wire fences stretch across the beaches; cardboard must cover the windows of their home each night; curfew is imposed on all residents. The World War II years in Hawaii were rife with prejudice against Japanese Americans--often suspected to be "enemy aliens" (43). However, Salisbury shows how Billy's haole family accept his friendship with Tomi and how Billy himself, paradoxically wise beyond his years yet still charmingly naïve, explains to Tomi why Keet is no longer his friend. Tomi tells us: "It took me a week to force it out of him [Billy]. Keet Wilson turned on me because I was Japanese, and he had been told by his friends at school that white guys weren't supposed to like Japanese guys" (17).

Early in the novel, the boys amble down to the nearby Ala Wai Canal where Papa's sampan, sunk by the U.S. Army one day after Pearl Harbor was attacked, is still visible just below the surface of the muddy water. The boat quickly becomes a symbol of the way life was before the attack ("in the before time"), when Tomi, Papa and Grampa Joji were together before the Army took Papa and Grampa away to U.S. Army prison camps. It also represents Tomi's personal war, which Salisbury adeptly counterpoints with the Big war of the real world. The novel follows Tomi engaging in his battles against the backdrop of the bigger war; we see the young dragon in the making carrying on the traditions of his ancestors; even at the end of the novel, Salisbury leaves Tomi still at war: "How many more battles stood between me and the day Papa would finally come home?" (287)

As Tomi and Billy battle to raise the Taiyo Maru from its muddy prison, their conflict with Keet Wilson and his blatant prejudice against the Japanese crescendos. Salisbury incorporates many details of Japanese culture and values. (Note: Salisbury includes a helpful glossary of Hawaiian and Japanese phrases and words at the end of the book.) The mantra Tomi remembers from his father, "Don't shame the family. Be helpful, be generous, be accepting," shows the importance of this and other values being passed from generation to generation (15). Family treasures such as the "family katana or samurai, symbol of our family's long history" had to be hidden to protect them from being confiscated by the government. Anything deemed "Japanese" could cast suspicion on the family's loyalty to America. Nevertheless, Keet seems to take every opportunity to cast aspersions on Tomi's family, culture, and values.

The title of the novel (and related title of Chapter 29 "The Red Fish") comes from another Japanese tradition: the "Koi-nobori. Carp made of paper looking like kites" hanging from a bamboo pole above Tomi's house for Boys' Day. Tomi tells us: "The four colorful fish streamers" represent the family: "Just below Papa's and Mama's blue and white ones was me--the red fish, a dragon in the making" (134). This tradition is vibrantly depicted on the novel's cover, too. The red splash of the third carp and the red letters of the last words of the title draw the reader's eye to this important part of the predominantly blue and green cover illustration.

HOUSE OF THE RED FISH focuses on themes and positive character traits in other novels by Salisbury: the relationship between father and son, the importance of tradition, and values such as integrity and perseverance. HOUSE OF THE RED FISH includes several father and son relationships; however, it is Salisbury's contrast of Keet and his father's relationship with that of Tomi and Papa that makes the strongest statement. Keet's father seems oblivious to even his most destructive acting out, but readers get strong sense that Tomi's father will someday be proud to see that his son's overriding motivation was to act as his missing father would want him to ("This is all for you, Papa, I thought. All for you.") (213).

Rich discussions could certainly flow in class or small reading groups from issues such as these in HOUSE OF THE RED FISH. Because Salisbury's characters are so believable, so human, middle school readers can relate to their conflicts and see similar situations in their own lives. I highly recommend this book not only to young readers who enjoyed UNDER THE BLOOD-RED SUN but also to parents and educators who want to point their charges to a well-written, engaging, inspiring, historical novel.