The breeze carried evidence of a baseball game-the distant crack-smack of hide against wood, the hoarse cry of a referee, a smoketrail of cheers. Boys in short pants raced by on important missions, laughing and shouting and tussling with their friends, while teenage girls sauntered in groups or sat on barracks steps, heads together, giggling and gossiping like girls did everywhere. Men and women who had stopped to chat knotted the streets, while others breezed along, all business. Maddalena bounded out of the bedroom and down the stairs before Mrs. You’re going, and we’ll make it our little secret.” “Their gardens and art shows put the rest of the county to shame. “She’s entitled to her opinion, dear, but I think they’re lovely folk.” My mother won’t let me anywhere near Manzanar. Henderson poked her head into Regina’s room, where the girls were sitting on the bed playing Hearts that blistering day, and said she was going to an art show at the Manzanar community center and did the girls want to join her, Maddalena jumped up. Maddalena had kept her word and ventured no farther east than Foothill Road, but that didn’t stop her from wondering what went on in the camp, what those people, supposedly so different from anyone else in Owens Valley, were like. Once Mama made up her mind, that was that. It was dangerous, Mama said who knew what the enemy might do? Maddalena had thought about arguing- she’d heard that the camp was going to be home to families, and how dangerous could grandmothers and children be?-but it would have been pointless.
The camp had been off limits since the day construction began more than three years ago. From either direction Manzanar looked the same-flat, repetitive rows of colorless, dismal-looking buildings and dry streets, giving off an air of despair she could smell from a distance. She was here, finally, in this mysterious place she’d seen only from the back of her father’s car on the road to Independence, or from the back of her horse, riding on Foothill Road. The day was blistering, hotter than usual for spring, but she didn’t care about the sweat and stink. Maddalena squeezed Regina’s hand as they walked past the Manzanar guardhouse.
Traveling between modern day Berkeley, CA and a notorious WWII-era Japanese American internment camp, the novel explores the unbreakable bond between mothers and daughters, and the power of family to endure despite distance, time, and long-buried secrets.
Ossola’s novel, The Wild Impossibility(May 2019 Regal House Publishing), has been described as “breathtaking… beautiful page turner” by New York Times bestselling author Katie Crouch, and praised for its “wonderfully rich prose and layered story” by award-winning writer Nina Schuyler.
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