A mother's journal, streaked with tears and bolstered by the laughter of her daughter's unfading memories, results in "Mammie's Journal of My Childhood"-a biographical history set in Indonesia in World War II.

From the comforts of colonial Dutch East Indies, Jolly, her mother and brother are thrust into a Japanese internment camp where they spend the next four and a half years separated from Jolly's father, a prisoner of war working on the Burma Railroad. Whether shivering in cool breezes on Brastagi's mountainside or sweating in the moist heat of monsoon-soaked Sumatran jungles, Nettie...