Inside Out and Back Again

A couple of years ago I got a summer grant to work with students to study and write a curriculum to teach Kao Kalia Yang's beautiful memoir The Latehomecomer. I loved teaching that book because it allowed me to combine my passion for human rights (specifically work with refugees in Minneapolis) with my love of literature.

I had that book in mind as I began reading Thanhha Lia's 2011 National Book Award-winning story of a girl coming with her family to the U.S. from Vietnam after the Americans pulled out. (The two books quite different, of course: Yang's is a memoir, written for adults, about a Hmong family; Lia's is a middle grade novel in verse about a Vietnamese family. Both are beautifully written and moving. Both do an excellent job of displacing the American idea that a refugee's story ends happily ever after upon arriving on American soil.)

How happy am I to see a novel in verse? So happy. This is poetry doing what poetry does best: giving you little snapshots into this world--into its emotional core--then leaving you room to imagine the rest. The images are crisp and memorable. I particularly liked her decision to date each poem at the bottom, which strengthened the sense of forward movement and gave a clear timeline. 

Highly recommended.

I hope Ms. Lia won't mind if I post just one example of sense of humor and observation. This one takes place when the family is in America, learning English.

First Rule

Brother Quang says

add an s to nouns

to mean more than one

even if there’s

already an s

sitting there.

Glass

Glass-es

All day

I practice

squeezing hisses

through my teeth.

Whoever invented

English

must have loved

snakes.

Inside Out & Back Again Thanhha Lai, p 118