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    A Study Guide for Cynthia Kadohata's "Kira-Kira"
    A Study Guide for Cynthia Kadohata's "Kira-Kira"
    A Study Guide for Cynthia Kadohata's "Kira-Kira"
    Ebook41 pages32 minutes

    A Study Guide for Cynthia Kadohata's "Kira-Kira"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Cynthia Kadohata's "Kira-Kira," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Literary Newsmakers for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Literary Newsmakers for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 20, 2016
    ISBN9781535826938
    A Study Guide for Cynthia Kadohata's "Kira-Kira"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Cynthia Kadohata's "Kira-Kira" - Gale

      1

      Kira-Kira

      Cynthia Kadohata

      2004

      Introduction

      Cynthia Kadohata's Kira-Kira, published in 2004, is the story of a young Japanese American girl growing up in the 1950s. This is Kadohata's first book for young adults, following several adult novels. It highlights the work and life experiences of Japanese Americans in the pre-Civil Rights era, as well as their struggles to achieve the American dream. The novel explores the relationship between individual and community identity. In Kira-Kira, community helps to define the individual. The main character, Katie, develops her sense of self through her experiences and relationships with others—friends and family, neighbors, teachers, and peers.

      Katie chronicles her family's life in the United States. In her first-person narration she emphasizes the lessons in honesty, love, disappointment, and hope that her sister, brother, and parents teach her. Although the novel recounts the many hardships the family endures—back-breaking work, poverty, racism, illness, and death—it also focuses on those moments in life that are kira-kira, which means glittering in Japanese. These are the moments when the characters of the novel experience the things that make life worth living: beauty, happiness, and hope.

      Author Biography

      Cynthia Kadohata was born in 1956 in Evanston, Illinois, the daughter of Japanese American parents. She has a journalism degree from the University of Southern California and attended graduate writing programs at Columbia University and the University of Pittsburgh. Kadohata believes her writing has been shaped by her family's experience as Japanese Americans, which included frequent moves across the United States in search of work. Kadohata drew on her family's experience for Kira-Kira, her novel for young readers which received the 2004 Newbery Medal.

      Kadohata was hailed as a new voice in American fiction in 1989, with the publication of her first book, The Floating World. Like Kira-Kira, this book also features a young girl's first-person narration of her family's moves throughout the United States. The Floating World was widely reviewed and praised for its masterful writing. Kadohata also published In the Heart of the Valley of Love (1992), set in the futuristic Los Angeles of 2052. She has frequently contributed short stories to periodicals such as The New Yorker, Grand Street, Ploughshares, and the Pennsylvania Review.

      Kadohata has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Whiting Writer's Award from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation. In 2006, Kadohata will publish Weedflower, another novel for young readers. Weedflower tells the story of a friendship between a young Japanese American girl living in an internment camp and a young Mojave boy living on the reservation. In Weedflower, as in

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