By Thanhha Lai
A year in the life of a ten-year-old girl who flees the fall of Saigon and has to start over, in a language she doesn't have yet, in Alabama.
Ha is ten, and Saigon is the only home she knows: the papaya tree in the yard, the market, her mother, her three older brothers, and a father who went missing in the war before she can remember him. Then the city falls, and her family crowds onto a boat with nothing, drifts, waits in a refugee tent, and finally lands in Alabama, sponsored by a stranger. There Ha has to become a beginner at everything, at eating, at making friends, at a language whose rules make no sense, while a few children at school taunt her for how she looks and how she talks. The whole book is her diary of one year, told in short, plain poems, and by the end this fierce, funny, homesick girl has found a little ground to stand on.
This is where the trail starts asking a child to read between the lines. Nothing is spelled out: you feel the fear of the boat, the sting of being laughed at, the ache of a father who never came home, from what Ha does and doesn't say, in poems with a lot of white space around them. It's drawn from the author's own childhood escaping Vietnam, so it rings true without ever lecturing, and Ha is such lively company that the homesickness never turns the book grim. It won the National Book Award and a Newbery Honor, and it hands a child a window into what leaving everything behind actually feels like.