Inside Out & Back Again
by Thanhha Lai
Saigon falls. She ends up in Alabama. In verse.
For you if
you moved somewhere new and felt like every single thing about you was wrong all at once
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Hà is ten years old when Saigon falls in 1975 and her family flees Vietnam on a ship. She ends up in Alabama, where the food is wrong and the language is wrong and the kids are cruel. Lai tells this story in verse — each poem a moment, a smell, a humiliation, a small victory — which turns out to be exactly the right form for the experience of displacement: nothing connects yet, everything is fragments. National Book Award winner. The most formally precise middle grade dispatch about the refugee experience, written by someone who lived it.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Vietnam • North America
- Voice
- Written by a Vietnamese author
- Topics
- fall of saigon
Part of a Reading Journey
Same pattern, different era
Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.
For the grown-up bookshelf
Same idea, written for a grown-up. Good for the adult in the room, too.
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✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST