While telling her family story, Suzanne Hartmann explores displacement, belonging, and race, and celebrates the struggle to preserve a Japanese presence in Canada. This lively story makes a significant contribution to the cultural conversation.
Ken McGoogan, author of Shadows of Tyranny
With insight and integrity, Hartmann deftly weaves light and dark threads of personal experience, family lore, and Japanese Canadian history into a handcrafted kimono that captures the beautiful imperfections of life.
Raymond K. Nakamura, cartoonist and author of Peach Girl
The Nail that Sticks Out is at once a touching portrait of the unique experience of Japanese Canadians while beautifully speaking to the larger narrative of intergenerational love and hardship that echoes through the experience of all immigrant communities.
Lara Okihiro, author of Obaasan’s Boots
The Nail That Sticks Out weaves together compelling community research and heartfelt family history to offer a glimpse into Japanese Canadian community amidst a legacy of uprooting, displacement, and in-betweenness. Navigating the uncertainty of both the past and the future, Hartmann's magnetic writing is a compass for those looking for markers of memory, resilience, and hope.
Leanne Toshiko Simpson, author of Never Been Better
This most insightful memoir reveals our most human desire to belong to a community fractured and spread out by the traumatic events of the Second World War.
Sally Ito, author of Heart’s Hydrography and The Emperor’s Orphans
A warm, touching memoir, full of insights that reveals a part of Canadian society rarely talked about in literature and in general.
Terry Watada, author of Hiroshima Bomb Money
Honest and insightful, a testament to Japanese Canadian resilience.
Kerri Sakamoto, author of Floating City
Richly textured, illuminating, and poignant. As Hartmann re-assembles the shards of her family’s past and her coming of age, the joinery, like kintsugi, is transformational.
Lorri Neilsen Glenn, author of The Old Moon in Her Arms