Thanh ha lai biography template
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Global Children’s abide YA Information Initiatives
Susan Corapi, Associate Senior lecturer, Trinity Worldwide University, Deerfield, IL
Photo Credit: Steve Puppe
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BookDragon Blog
Half-way through reading this debut autobiographical novel-in-verse, I had a lively conversation about the cover with a delightful new friend who happens to be a bonafide kiddie-book expert. We had just finished sharing our shock over the recent fiasco surrounding the one-too-many finalists for the 2011 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature (Chime, not Shine), and what came up almost immediately after was this cover …
Our verdict on said cover in the most neutral terms (other words were exchanged) was that it was incongruous with the contents. The pink and purple background, the spindly, cartoonish figure of the little girl, her right hand upraised just so … we both readily agreed that the other novel-in-verse about the 10-year-old Vietnam War survivor (how many could there be?) was much better packaged: all the broken pieces by Ann E. Burg. Both titles together, by the way, make for illuminating companion texts in exploring the post-Vietnam War refugee immigrant experience.
As the lunar new year of 1975 begins, 10-year-old Hà rises early to be the first to “tap my big toe / to the tile floor / first.” She realizes she’s disobeying her mother who warned the night before that one of her three older b
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Publishing Perspectives
By Dennis Abrams
While the process may have begun with controversy and confusion, it ended in triumph for Thanhha Lai, when her first novel, Inside Out & Back Again (HarperCollins) was awarded the 2011 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature.
Asked in an interview to describe her book in one sentence, Lai once replied, “For ten-year old Ha, life in Vietnam during the war was chaotic yet fun; horror only happened when she and her family resettled in Alabama.” Of course the book is much more than that. It is a novel told in verse, 121 delicately shaded poems that trace a year in the life of Ha from Tet to Tet.
From life as a ten-year-old in Saigon as the war in Vietnam comes to an end, “We pretend/the monsoon has come early./In the distance/bombs/explode like thunder,/slashes/lighten the sky,/gunfire/falls like rain,” as her family escapes to America. “Morning, noon, and night/we each get/one clump of rice,/small, medium, large,/according to our height,/plus one cup of water/no matter our size./The first hot bite/of freshly cooked rice,/plump and nutty,/makes me imagine/the taste of ripe papaya/although one has nothing to do with the other.”
Lai Tranhha
On the family’s eventual resettlement in Alabama and the difficulties