In November, I read the book Inside Out & Back Again by Thanhha Lai. Inside Out & Back Again is a historical fiction book about a young girl named Há who has to flee her home in Saigon Vietnam during the Vietnam War. Há has only ever known Saigon where she has her very own papaya tree. Saigon is where her home is, her traditions her friends and everything she’s ever known is in Saigon. When Há and her family has to board a ship hoping to find a new home, she has to leave almost everything behind including her papaya tree. Inside Out & Back Again is written in a series of poems about Há and her family’s moving journey trying to find a new home.

I enjoyed reading this book as Há’s experience was similar to my grandparents. My grandparents also had to flee from Vietnam during the war and stayed in a Refugee camp, which eventually brought them here. It was interesting to learn more about that difficult time from somebody else’s perspective. Lots of the food Há and her family ate me and my family also eat. My family also celebrates Tết similar to Há’s family. During Tết we eat sugary lotus seeds and rice cakes. We also eat Báhn chưng and báhn cuốn. The imagery and descriptions make the items in the book come alive and help make a picture in the readers’ mind. The way the author used the five senses to describe what Há was experiencing at different times made me feel like I was experiencing what Há was experiencing. The author also did an exceptional job not only describing what was going on with Há and her family but also what was going on around them.

My favorite character is Há’s mom. Há’s mom is my favorite character because she always takes care of Há and her brothers. Even during rough times she always finds a way to support her children. One of her character traits is hard-working. A quote that proves this character trait is, “On weekdays Mother’s a secretary in a navy office, trusted to count out salaries in cash at the end of each month. At night she stays up late designing and cutting baby clothes to give to seamstresses” (14). This quote proves Há’s mom is hardworking because she is always working to try and make money so she can support her kids. On top of her job, she designs baby clothes trying to make extra money while having to raise four kids at the same time.

My favorite quote from the book is on pages 63 and 64, “Everyone knows the ship could sink, unable to hold the piles of bodies that keep crawling on like raging ants from a disrupted nest. But no one is heartless enough to say stop because what if they had been stopped before their turn?” I like this quote because it shows how everyone just wants to get to safety and even though other people know if more people board it could make the ship sink, they don’t want to stop them since if that was them they wouldn’t want to be stopped. I also like this quote because it shows the hardship of trying to feel from your home country.