GENRE: Young Adult; Historical Fiction
Release Date: February 29, 2016
Publisher: Clean Teen Publishing
Format Available: Mass Paperback and Digital Format
What if Peter Pan was a homeless kid just trying to survive, and Wendy flew away for a really good reason?
Seventeen-year-old Kettle has had his share of adversity. As an orphaned Japanese American struggling to make a life in the aftermath of an event in history not often referred to—the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and the removal of children from orphanages for having "one drop of Japanese blood i6n them"—things are finally looking up. He has his hideout in an abandoned subway tunnel, a job, and his gang of Lost Boys.
Desperate to run away, the world outside her oppressive brownstone calls to naïve, eighteen-year-old Nora—the privileged daughter of a controlling and violent civil rights lawyer who is building a compensation case for the interned Japanese Americans. But she is trapped, enduring abuse to protect her younger sister Frankie and wishing on the stars every night for things to change.
For months, they've lived side by side, their paths crossing yet never meeting. But when Nora is nearly killed and her sister taken away, their worlds collide as Kettle, grief stricken at the loss of a friend, angrily pulls Nora from her window.
In her honeyed eyes, Kettle sees sadness and suffering. In his, Nora sees the chance to take to the window and fly away.
Set in 1953, NORA AND KETTLE explores the collision of two teenagers facing extraordinary hardship. Their meeting is inevitable, devastating, and ultimately healing. Their stories, a collection of events, are each on their own harmless. But together, one after the other, they change the world.
Lauren Nicolle Taylor is the best-selling and award winning author of The Woodlands Series. Below you will also find a note from her about her inspiration for Nora & Kettle.
Author's Note:
This book is primarily about love and survival. So I want to thank the people who taught me about these two things. The way they work together. How they are inextricably linked in times of adversity. Love comes in many forms as everyone knows. Romantic love, love of family, of friends, and of oneself. To me, it is the backbone of getting through, the thing that holds us up when the world is trying to pull us down to the dirt. And even if we do fall, I think it somehow stops the dirt from clinging.
My inspiration for this novel came from two people who survived some of the most appalling conditions during their internment during World War Two, my grandparents, John (Grandad) and Jeanne (Nanna).
During the Japanese occupation of Malaysia, they were thrown into two separate internment camps in Singapore. Grandad was beaten severely, starved and forbidden from seeing his wife and baby. Nanna, still nursing her young infant at the time, was forced to eat rodents and insects just to survive. They were just nineteen, newly married and in love, facing conditions no one should ever have to face.
But they got through, and if you asked Nana how, her answer, in her very vibrant and animated way of speaking, was love, the hope she would see Grandad again, and that they would get out, make a life for themselves, and never look back on the muddy, razor wire-surrounded grounds of those camps again.
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