Inside Out and Back Again: A Newbery Honor Award Winner Paperback – January 2, 2013

Inside Out and Back Again is a touching book about a young girl named Hà who has to leave Vietnam and move to the U.S. because of the war. The story is written in short poems, which makes it easy to read but still very emotional.You really feel what Hà is going through—missing her home, learning a new language, and trying to fit in. It's sad at times, but also full of hope and strength.Great for kids and adults. I learned a lot and felt a lot. Highly recommend!

“This book touched my heart deeply. Thanhha Lai’s poetic storytelling paints vivid emotions and experiences of a young girl navigating immense change and hardship. It’s a powerful, honest, and uplifting read—perfect for readers of all ages looking for a moving story about courage and hope.”

The end of the Vietnam War comes alive for young readers in this thoughtful book of prose poetry. Ha, the poet, is a ten year old girl living in Saigon with her mother and three older brothers as 1975 dawns. We follow her heartbreaking, hopeful journey over the course of a year: the war creeps closer, the Communists close in, and Ha and her family are fortunate enough to make it onto a South Vietnamese naval boat turned refugee ship, but they must leave their home - and their tenuous connection to Ha's father, who was captured by the Communists over 8 years ago - behind. Eventually, the family arrives in America.The author, who in truth is telling much of her own personal history in this book, refuses the temptation to tie the book up with happy endings. Instead, we read of the many challenges, especially racist words and actions, that Ha and her family face as they adjust to life in America. At the same time, though, we also learn of the humane and compassionate people who help her family settle in. Most importantly, Ha tells her story in an unflinching voice, revealing a robust range of emotional truths that run the gamut from anger and shame through hope and excitement all the way to bewilderment and frustration as Ha labors to be understood and to understand the world into which she has been thrust.This book is an excellent choice for middle grade students studying America's war history, life as a refugee, the cultural realities of the US in the mid-1970's, or who are learning how to use evocative details and emotional commentary in order to keep a reader engaged. Terrific work!

Exquisite simplicity.With few words, the author is able to completely convey the emotions, hope, beauty, and resilience of this child, her family, and of the people from this culture.Like all 10-year-old girls, she has issues with her siblings, secret aspirations, epic frustration, struggles being obedient to her mother, rapture when certain things, like the papayas, and then there are things particularly unique to her, such as her indomitable strength, her backbone, her loyalty to her family, and her love of learning.This book truly shattered my heart.This book is, from start to finish, a wonder of incredibly powerful prose, yet the author has a deft hand, because she uses sparse sentences and clear language to convey such extraordinary depth.This book is an incredible tool to help you empathize with the immigrants in your community. How foreign and strange and incomprehensible the most basic things must seem to them. A trip to the grocery store, for example, must be completely discombobulating. And yet, most of us are utterly unaware of how Herculean these basic tasks are and how exhausting and alienating the basics of assimilation are, the "basics" that our immigrant neighbors, and especially "English language learning" children, face every day.One brief example: via charity, this refugee immigrant child is given some clothing. She wears her new dress to school. All the children laugh at her, because she's wearing a nightgown. And she is angry, how was she supposed to know this was not a dress, that this is actually a nightgown? All the children laugh at her and say it's made out of flannel, of course. But to this child, that's completely irrational and a ridiculous "code". Fabric dictates the kind of place a particular item of clothing is to be worn and not worn? It's this kind of example that really shows you how difficult it is to navigate the passage between an old home in a different country, and a new home in a new country where not one single thing is the same. Not the language, not the food, not the "rules", not the religion, not the landscape, not even the trees.I loved, loved this book. It's been a long, long time since I felt so strongly about a novel.This is quite simply a wonderful read that will stay with you long after the book is finished. I plan to reread it many, many times.It is a compelling, interesting, positive, highly readable, and elegant book.Thank you for writing it.