Showing results by author "Suzanne Kamata" in All Categories

Today was a special day for Maria and her family–it was dolphin day! Maria is hard of hearing and is concerned it will be difficult to communicate with the dolphins at the Dolphin Research Center. Once Maria meets Sparky and Sally, her fears float away! Join the adventure as Maria, her brother Jack, and their mother and father, feed the dolphins and watch them flip and twirl in the water!

Thirteen-year-old Satoshi Matsumoto spent the last three years living in Atlanta where he was the star of his middle-school baseball team - a slugger with pro potential, according to his coach. Now that his father's work in the US has come to an end, he's moved back to his hometown in rural Japan. Living abroad has changed him, and now his old friends in Japan are suspicious of his new foreign ways. Even worse, his childhood foe Shintaro, whose dad has ties to gangsters, is in his homeroom.

When Christine, an idealistic young American teacher, meets and marries Hideki Yamada, an aspiring Japanese high school baseball coach, she believes that their love with be enough to sustain them as they deal with cultural differences. However, Hideki's duties, and the team of fit, obedient boys whom he begins to think of as a surrogate family, take up more and more of his time, just as Christine is struggling to manage the needs of their multiply-disabled daughter and their sensitive son. Things come to a head when their son is the victim of bullies.

Kamata's adventures with her teen—who happens to be deaf, with cerebral palsy, and in a wheelchair—through subterranean Tennessee, to the islands of Japan, and to the top of the Eiffel Tower ultimately lead to a daughter's increasing independence, a mother letting go of expectations, and advocacy for travel which prohibits discrimination.