Inside Out & Back Again

Inside Out & Back Again: What is it like to leave everything you know behind - including the hope that your missing father will return from war - and make a new life halfway across the world? What's it like to feel family disaster is your fault for deliberately doing something you've been told not to? What's it like to go from being smart in school to being dumb?

Ha is ten when she has to leave Saigon on a dangerous boat journey to a new life in America with her mother and brothers. Even though the bombs are scary, she loves her home: the matching dishes and the papaya tree she grew from a pip flicked into the garden. She doesn't want to leave Vietnam and settling in mid-West America is a painful, bewildering process. The language is impossible and daily life is fraught with poverty, racism and bullying. Despite all the difficulties, however, Ha finds first kindness and, eventually, hope, friendship, joy and acceptance.

Thanhha Lai uses the economy of poetry to zoom in on small details that sum up so much more. Food is used to symbolise the confusion and misery of their early months in America where chicken might as well be 'bread soaked in water' rather than 'smelling of meadows and tasting sweet'. Later, Ha fears that the 'pink sausage … smeared with sauces yellow and red' is making fun of the Vietnamese flag until she remembers 'that no one here likely knows that flag's colours'.

This poignant verse novel addresses some of the big questions and challenges of being a refugee but also encapsulates the emotional aspects. Basing the story on her own experiences, Thanhha Lai explains in an author's note that she wanted it to explain these to her nephews and nieces to help them understand their parents' generation. It is just as enlightening for a wider audience and the focus on detail brings moments of humour to lighten the sadness.

Inside Out and Back Again would be perfect for sharing as a moving story to build empathy - perhaps alongside When Stars are Scattered and Front Desk - but also to develop writing skills. Lai exemplifies how to generate what she calls 'fresh, concise images' and to 'say it without saying it'. I will be using this as an excellent model for writing as well as a read aloud to widen horizons and provoke discussion. It is a book I will be returning to again and again.

272 pages / Reviewed by Louisa Farrow, teacher

Suggested Reading Age 9+