Mueller offers a memoir in three parts chronicling her unusual childhood; her friendship with Mary Mon Toy, the titular showgirl; and her search for truth about the past.

When the U.S. government imprisoned people of Japanese heritage in internment camps in 1942, it tore families apart. Fifty-two years later, a remarkable friendship developed in which the camps’ legacy of trauma was still evident. In Part One of this remembrance, the author guides readers through her childhood as one of the few white children born in the internment camps. Her father, a conscientious objector, organized the prisoner-operated cooperative stores in California’s Tule Lake Camp, and her mother was a teacher there. The author writes that she later hid her past at the camp from others, just as she hid her mother’s Jewishness from antisemitic neighbors and her father’s political activism from those who might disapprove: “I’ve often wondered if my country’s failure to atone for the crime I was born into contributed to my creating my alternate persona,” she says. In Part Two, Mueller shifts the setting to New York City, where she met Mary Mon Toy, a charming Japanese American woman whose persona was as fictitious as the characters she played on Broadway. The two women’s lives intertwined, and Mueller supported Mon Toy through her final days; Mon Toy died in 2009 at the age of 93. In Part Three, Mueller uncovers the traumas that Mon Toy, whose given name was Mary Watanabe, suffered as an interred American citizen, and as an Asian American performer in America. Mueller presents readers with a frank investigation of the effects of internment on individuals and on American society; along the way, she effectively adds context and insights from a range of historical texts and academic papers, noting how repercussions have reverberated through time. She uncovers truths about herself, as well, exploring the similarities and differences of her and Mon Toy’s experiences. The book feels excessively detailed in places and somewhat longer than it needs to be. Still, it’s an insightful and worthwhile read.

An earnest personal reflection on the wide-ranging effects of World War II-era internment camps.

Set in 1969, this riveting novel of adventure and suspense tells a story of an ex-Peace Corps volunteer who, disillusioned and haunted by her experience in coastal Ecuador, returns to that country's exotic rain forest with the hope of making sense of—if not peace with—her past. Annie Saunders, the half-Jewish daughter of a New York City labor organizer, arrived in Guayaquil in the early 60's fueled by the idealism of the Kennedy era. Though a skilled community organizer and reporter for a small alternative radio station, Saunders, like others with her, was still ill-prepared for the realities of day-to-day life in an oppressed, developing country. When her activism led to the torture of the peasants who followed her protest call and when she was unable to save a dying infant from the terrible throes of dehydration, she fled, crushed by guilt. Now she has returned with her German husband, Kai, on their honeymoon. His desire is to view rare birds; hers is to understand the moral complexities of what she left behind. They fail to anticipate how deeply they will be drawn into the new battlelines forming between the indigenous population and the American oil companies, who seem willing to go to extremes to protect their interests. Mueller captures with rare honesty the complexity and cultural manipulations that occur when an oppressed people must fight for survival and forces of greed vie for the riches of a quickly disappearing paradise. It also captures the lure—and difficulty— of exotic travel.

Life in the wartime Tule Lake Japanese American Segregation Camp, in a nuanced yet strangely unaffecting tale of a pacifist’s struggle to reconcile his beliefs with the camp militants’ violent behavior. Mueller (Green Fires, 1994) was herself born in Tule Camp, where her parents carried on lives not dissimilar to those of protagonists Esther and Denton Jordan and their three-year-old daughter, Parin. Here, she ably evokes the locale’s bleak prairie setting and the cramped living quarters of both the resident Japanese and the Americans—but this isn—t enough to make Denton the complex man that he should be. Instead, as Mueller tells the story of his struggle to maintain the prosperous Japanese-run cooperative he’s established, and his efforts to deal with his Jewish in-laws (not sympathetic to his pacifism), Denton comes across as terminally smug. Though Esther remains loyal, his obsessive commitment to his work wears her down, as do the camp’s isolation and growing divisiveness. When the US Army takes over the camp, young Japanese militants begin a campaign of violence and confrontation that threatens not only to compromise Denton’s ideals but to undo all his hard work. A group assaults him; Tokura Honda, who runs the cooperative, is murdered; and Denton feels both sides” distrust intensifying. While Esther visits her family in San Francisco, he begins a highly charged affair with a nurse. And though he’s tempted to join the army, his principles will win out. Which is fine, though somehow not all that moving. Mueller grapples, often admirably, with complex subjects . . . but never quite masters them.

In Mueller’s third (The Climate of the Country, 1999, etc.), a woman whose history closely parallels the author’s bio, nurses her dying mother and attempts to come to terms with their troubled relationship.

A writer and former Peace Corps worker happily married to an Argentinean psychiatrist in New York, Sarah has come to Puerto Rico, where her mother Reba battles the last stages of cancer. Mueller depicts the weakening old woman’s gradual loss of dignity with painful accuracy, but her real focus is Sarah, whose day-by-day account of Reba’s physical deterioration alternates with narratives from the younger woman’s early family memories. Reba forsook her Jewish roots to marry a labor organizer who earned little money and frequently moved. Teaching school to support the family, she suppressed her own ambitions while taking out her frustrations on Sarah. Always the dutiful daughter on the surface, Sarah still seethes with inward anger toward her mother, an anger so great that she has decided not to have children of her own, to avoid the risk of inflicting her own childhood unhappiness on them. Although depicted in hostile detail, Reba’s past sins as an overly involved, overly critical, yet neglectful parent never accumulate into a convincing case of parental abuse. In fact, Reba comes across as a typically flawed mother whose faults do not negate her love for husband and daughter and who does not deserve middle-aged Sarah’s unrelenting, increasingly tiresome antagonism. Sarah picks at her hostility toward Reba like a scab, never moving beyond her adolescent resentments. More engaging is a subplot of the uneasy friendship she develops with Reba’s Puerto Rican housekeeper, Lydia. Lydia is warm and wise, but because her boyfriend has a history of drug use, Sarah mistrusts the motives behind the woman’s affection. Ultimately, Sarah accepts Lydia in a way she can never accept her mother.

An earnest, if sometimes oppressive, exploration of well-worn territory.