• Gasa Gasa Girl Goes to Camp

  • A Nisei Youth Behind a World War II Fence
  • By: Lily Yuriko Nakai Havey
  • Narrated by: Kay Webster
  • Length: 6 hrs and 7 mins
  • 4.3 out of 5 stars (3 ratings)

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Gasa Gasa Girl Goes to Camp  By  cover art

Gasa Gasa Girl Goes to Camp

By: Lily Yuriko Nakai Havey
Narrated by: Kay Webster
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Publisher's summary

Lily Nakai and her family lived in Southern California, where sometimes she and a friend dreamt of climbing the Hollywood sign that lit the night. At age 10, after believing that her family was simply going on a “camping trip”, she found herself living in a tar-papered barrack, nightly gazing out instead at a searchlight. She wondered if anything would ever be normal again.

In this creative memoir, Lily Havey combines uses storytelling to recount her youth in two Japanese American internment camps during World War II. In short vignettes snapshots of people, recreated scenes, and events, a 10-year-old girl develops into a teenager while confined. Havey reveals the historical, cultural, and familial contexts of that growth and of the Nakais’ dislocation. Her animated writing pulls us into a turbulent era when America disgracefully incarcerated, without due process, thousands of American citizens because of their race.

These stories of love, loss, and discovery recall a girl balancing precariously between childhood and adolescence. In turn wrenching, funny, touching, and biting but consistently engrossing, they elucidate the daily challenges of life in the camp and the internees’ many adaptations.

©2014 University of Utah Press (P)2021 University of Utah Press
  • Unabridged Audiobook
  • Categories: History

Critic reviews

Winner of the Evans Biography Award, 2014

Selected by the American Library Association as one the Best of the Best from University Presses.

Finalist in the cover design category in the Southwest Book Design and Production Awards.

Featured Article: 10 Audiobooks to Listen to on the Day of Remembrance


In 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, mandating the removal of Japanese Americans from their homes. Nearly 120,000 Japanese immigrants and native born Japanese Americans were imprisoned in concentration camps for the duration of World War II. We need to bear witness to the atrocities committed by the United States government and the pain our leadership caused innocent men, women, and children of Japanese heritage.

What listeners say about Gasa Gasa Girl Goes to Camp

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Very Well Done

it is a nice and different point of view, a child's, one that invites the reader to be compassionate and more understanding of how America's memory of the Japanese American Incarnation Camps has been shared in such a different light than that of the reality of those camps. Horse stalls for a dwelling, shared, and without walls, toilets, poor, if any, medical care, and utter shame and complete astonishment that their government would incarcerate Americans.

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very good

Loved it !! this story. the narrator is so fantastic it's like your really there!! good overall

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