While I was away

"Whem Waka's mother suspects her twelve-year-old daughter can't understand basic Japanese, she makes a drastic decision to ship Waka to Tokyo to live with her strict grandmother and reconnect with the culture and master the language. Goodbye friends, end-of-sixth-grade parties, and fun, and goodbye summer vacation. Plucked from her straight-A-student life in rural Kansas and sent halfway across the globe, where her reading levels are embarrassingly low, Waka embarks on what feels like the hardest five months of her life: learning an incredibly complicated writing system called kanji, dealing with the social politics of classmates who think she's illiterate, and attempting to understand her complicated Obaasama. Even though this is the country her parents came from Waka has never felt more like an outsider"--Jacket flap.