Inside Out & Back Again
2011
- verse novels
- vietnam war
- north vietnamese army
- juvenile fiction
- stories in verse
- people & places
- social themes
- emigration & immigration
- new experience
- children's stories
The story
Inside Out & Back Again is a verse novel by Thanhha Lai. The book was awarded the 2011 National Book Award for Young People's Literature and one of the two Newbery Honors. The novel was based on her first year in the United States, as a ten-year-old girl who spoke no English in 1975.
What it’s like
Short, spare free-verse poems that read like a diary kept in a child's notebook, each one often no more than a page, with white space doing much of the work. The voice is wry, observant and tender, noticing small things: the tang of fish sauce, the slipperiness of a new language, the strangeness of snow and of American school lunches. The emotional register is wistful and quietly funny, a homesick, unsettled ache softened by a child's bright attention to detail, with grief about the war and the family's flight kept mostly at the edges. Intensity is low: war and loss are present in memory and brief mentions, with no graphic violence or gore, and the emotional weight comes from displacement rather than danger. Pacing is brisk, since each short poem is a small window onto one moment, so it reads in a single evening. The arc follows a young girl slowly finding her footing in a foreign place while holding on to what she left behind. It suits a rainy afternoon, a quiet reading hour, or a gentle read for older children and adults who want something tender, humane and unhurried, especially readers drawn to stories of migration and belonging.
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