Castle Rock is a historical young-adult love story that began within the turmoil accompanying one the most devastating and hostile events in recent American history: the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December of 1941. 

In the wake of this horrendous event, the war-driven American government confiscated the homes, animals, businesses, and personal possessions of Japanese Americans, citizens all. They were carted off to internment camps in remote areas of the United States for four excruciating years. Their only crime was having Japanese ancestry. 

The worst of these internment camps was at Tule Lake, California, at the extreme northeastern tip of the state. It was here that a petite, artistic, sensitive ten-year-old Japanese American girl sought solace by retreating to the furthest edge of the camp’s barbed-wire enclosure, beneath the shadow of the imposing mountain called The Peninsula, soon named Castle Rock by the internees. The mountain comforted her. It was strength and a symbol of freedom. 

Outside the barbed-wire-crowned metal fence, with its frightening armed guard towers, a curious ten-year-old American boy one day cautiously approached on his bike to say a nervous hello to the girl who so intrigued him from a distance. This visit started four years of meetings between the two. Then one day the internees were released and loaded onto buses, to be transported out of the Tule Lake Internment Camp. 

What would Jin and her family find when they returned home? Would their family’s ranch and possessions be gone? Would Jin and Luke ever see each other again?