Harper, 2011Â Â Â Â Â Â Â 
The winner of this year’s National Book Award for the best YA title of the year just happens to be another great find for my Best Contemporary Historical Novels list, and I couldn’t be more excited!
This aching and spare novel in verse (which totally deserves the honor!), tells a story of a ten-year-old girl, Ha, whose family must escape from Vietnam in the last year of the war, and start over in Alabama.
I think it’s the details that really brought this story to life, and made it great — the taste and look of papaya, Ha’s favorite fruit; her apt descriptions of people in her home country and in the new land; her struggles with English and with being made to feel “dumb.”
That, and the characterization of the tough, spunky heroine who knows what she wants and what she doesn’t. And the voice, at once spare and lyrical.
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My new teacher has brown curls
looped tight to her scalp
like circles in a beehive.
She points to her chest:
MiSSSÂ SScott,
saying it three times,
each louder
with ever more spit.
I repeat, MiSSSÂ SScott,
careful to hiss every s.
She doesn’t seem impressed.
I tap my own chest:
Ha.
She must have heard
ha,
as in funny ha-ha-ha.
She fakes a laugh.
I repeat, Ha,
and wish I knew
enough English
to tell her
to listen for
the diacritical mark,
this one directing
the tone
downward.
My new teacher tilts
her head back,
fakes
an even sadder laugh.
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Isn’t this beautiful?
I think this is especially perfect for a middle-grade social studies classroom. Kids would learn a lot about that period of time by reading this book. And not just kids — I know I have.
Congratulations, Thanhha!
Katiaesque 
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