Meg's family must leave Japan as World War II approaches. Missionary families are no longer safe there. But Father is told he must stay behind. Can the family make it home to America without him? How will Meg adapt to life in the USA, which feels more foreign to her than Japan ever did? Can she make sense of the religious ideas she was taught as a child, to grow into the person she is meant to be?
About the Author: A chance visit to Bookworks bookstore in Albuquerque introduced Katy to National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and she wrote her first novel in 2012. The next year she began showing her elementary school students how to write novels. Katy and her fourth and fifth graders were featured in a November, 2013 article in Albuquerque: The Magazine (Vol. 10, No. 7 pp. 38-39). Over the past five years, 28 students have completed and published novels in her classroom. Katy prides herself in nurturing student creativity, courage, and identity as New Mexicans and Americans. Themes of belonging, intelligence, and moral courage appear throughout her fiction writing. Katy Hammel was born in Japan, the daughter and grand-daughter of American Protestant missionaries. As a child, she traveled the world with her family, but she always knew she was an American girl and she longed to live in the USA. Having grown up in a country as densely populated as Japan, Katy was particularly drawn to the wide-open spaces of the American west. After finishing her undergraduate degree at Yale University, working in Brooklyn, New York and Fairfield, Connecticut, Katy headed west. She settled in Albuquerque and began a fruitful career as a civil rights lawyer. In 1998, she was named the ACLU-New Mexico's Attorney of the Year. Katy met her husband in law school and they have two sons. As the children grew, Katy changed direction and became a teacher for children with giftedness and other learning exceptionalities. She achieved National Board Certification as a teacher in 2013 and was selected as Teacher of the Year by the New Mexico Association for the Gifted. Katy has served on the boards of state-wide organizations that host activities and competitions for New Mexico's young people, including Destination Imagination and English Expo. She was recently inducted into the Delta Kappa Gamma honorary society of women teachers. Meg Goes to America is her first published novel. To prepare to write this novel, Katy traveled to the site of the Manzanar internment camp in California, where her grandfather did indeed work as a chaplain. She also benefited from interviews with family members and research at the Presbyterian Historical Society in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Although many of the incidents depicted in the novel describe or were inspired by historical events, it is a work of fiction.