Journey to Topaz focuses on a socially sensitive topic. Parents and teachers are likely to face some difficult questions from young readers who, like the Sakanes, at first do not believe that such things can happen in America. Although Journey to Topaz is fiction, it has not been sensationalized to hold the reader's interest. Everything that happens in the novel derives from the author's personal experience. Even the bizarre and outrageous shooting of Mr. Kurihara is based on an actual incident at Topaz, in which an older man was shot to death by a guard. Uchida skillfully makes the historical events meaningful on a personal level, showing how individual lives were forever altered by the relocation of the West Coast's Japanese-Americans.

In her "Prologue" to the 1985 Creative Arts Book Company edition of Journey to Topaz, Uchida declares, "I hope by reading this book young people everywhere...