A poignant novel in verse about a Hmong girl losing and finding home in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. For fans of Jasmine Warga and Veera Hiranandani
For eleven-year-old Gao Sheng, home is the lush, humid jungles and highlands of Laos. Home is where she can roll down the grassy hill with her younger siblings after her chores, walk to school, and pick ripe peaches from her family’s trees.
But home becomes impossible to hold onto when the communist government takes over after U.S. troops pull out of the Vietnam War. The communists will be searching for any American allies, like Gao Sheng’s father, a Hmong captain in the Lao Army who fought alongside the Americans against the Vietnamese. If he’s caught, he’ll be killed.
As the adults frantically make plans – contacting family, preparing a route, and bundling up their silver and gold, Gao Sheng wonders if she will ever return to her beloved Laos and what’s to become of her family now. Gao Sheng only knows that a good daughter doesn’t ask questions or complain. A good daughter doesn’t let her family down. Even though sometimes, she wishes she could be just a kid rolling down a grassy hill again.
On foot, by taxi and finally in a canoe, Gao Sheng and her family make haste from the mountains to the capitol Vientiane and across the rushing Mekong River, to finally arrive at an overcrowded refugee camp in Thailand. As a year passes at the camp, Gao Sheng discovers how to rebuild home no matter where she is and finally find her voice.
Inspired by author V.T. Bidania’s family history, A Year Without Home illuminates the long, difficult journey that many Hmong refugees faced after the Vietnam War.---from the publisher
432 pages 978-0593697207 Ages 10 and up
Keywords: novel in verse, historical fiction, refugee, journey, Hmong, home, Asian, Asian American, diverse books, war, change, family life, courage, Vietnam War, 10 year old, 11 year old, 12 year old, 13 year old
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Other reviews:
"As gripping as it is informative and as beautiful as it is heartbreaking, A Year Without Home does what all great books do: spark curiosity, ignite compassion, and leave its readers changed for the better. The young people who read V.T. Bidania's story will feel energized and empowered to make their future kinder, more peaceful, and more just than either the past or our present."—Jarrett Lerner, award-winning author-illustrator of A Work in Progress
*****
“The UN education agency, UNESCO, says that the bombing of a primary school during the US and Israeli military attacks on Iran on Saturday constitutes a grave violation of humanitarian law.”
(3/1/26)
"’A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will,’ Trump said in a post on Truth Social.” (4/7/26)
“Call it peace or call it treason
Call it love or call it reason
But I ain’t a-marching anymore”
– Phil Ochs (1965)
Candlelight
(May 14, before dawn)
When I wake,
it’s so early,
it feels like
the middle of the night.
A chorus or crickets
trills outside our door.
A noisy river toad
croaks
by the stream.
The smell of incense
floats toward me.
I follow it to the family alter
where Dad stands,
holding incense sticks in his hands.
Ribbons of smoke
curl from the tips of the incense,
sending messages to my grandfather
and our ancestors.
Dad is asking
for their protection and guidance
during our journey.
Like me and everyone else
he’s sad to leave too.
Hurry, Mom says
when she spots me
in the shadows.
I rush back to our room,
lift my sisters from the bed,
help them dress by candlelight.
Yia is already up,
peeking out at the black sky.
He turns to me.
What if we don’t come back?
I don’t know.
What if we never find
another place like this?
What he means is
another place
like home.
But I can’t answer Yia
because I’m asking myself
the very same thing,”
It is now a half-century since the end of the Vietnam War and the subsequent Communist takeover of Laos. Based on her research and the true stories of her family’s experience (which she was too young to remember firsthand), author V.T. Bidania weaves an often close-call, breath-holding tale about a family’s panicked departure from Laos, and time spent in one Thailand refugee camp, and then another one. The story concludes with a joyful reunification in
America.
The tale’s narrator is eleven-year-old firstborn Gao Sheng. She is an enthusiastic scholar, a responsible big sister to her three little sisters, and close to Yia, the one boy among the siblings. Their father was among the Hmong working with the CIA and fighting alongside the Americans in Vietnam and now, in the wake of the Communist takeover, he is a marked man. Leaving behind their home in the northern mountains of Laos, leaving the family dog and horse, the main character’s extended family faces dangers but a group of them make it in one piece to the Nam Phong Refugee Camp in Thailand. The whereabouts of other family members remains a mystery.
It’s tough when a new best friend and her family eventually depart the camp, having been sponsored for resettlement in America; it's even harder when family members are chosen to leave. Gao Sheng’s father has hopes of being able to return home to Laos, but he eventually sees the writing on the wall and they are chosen to travel to a new home in the U.S..
With Trump’s war of choice overshadowing the world, and a mandatory U.S. draft registration set to begin later this year. A YEAR WITHOUT HOME is a seriously relevant, powerful, coming-of-age story for tweens. It reveals the human toll to be paid by innocent people and children, thanks to those leaders of countries, sects, gangs, or whatever, who, for their own reasons, or for no good reason, choose to initiate hostilities and move us all another generation away from the Sixties dream of world peace I embraced in my own tween days,.
A YEAR WITHOUT HOME is a book to embrace.
Richie Partington, MLIS, California USA
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