Inside Out and Back Again
Thanhha Lai (2011)
“A girl flees Saigon with her family in 1975 and must rebuild herself — name, language, and all — in a small Alabama town that has never seen anyone like her.”
At a Glance
Ten-year-old Ha narrates one year of her life in verse, beginning on Tet 1975 in Saigon, Vietnam, through the fall of the city to Communist forces, the family's desperate escape on a navy ship, months in a refugee camp in Guam, and relocation to Alabama — where Ha must endure school bullying, cultural isolation, and the ongoing mystery of her missing father while slowly, painfully finding a new self she can inhabit.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
Inside Out and Back Again won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature in 2011 and was a Newbery Honor book in 2012. It is one of the first widely taught American middle-grade novels to center the Vietnamese refugee experience, and one of the few verse novels to achieve mainstream classroom adoption. It opened a door for books like Refugee by Alan Gratz and Inside Out and Back Again itself is now a standard assignment in the grades 5-8 curriculum across the United States.
Diction Profile
Simple, direct, image-centered — the register of a child who is highly observant but not yet fully bilingual. Language is treated as a material thing throughout the novel.
Moderate but concentrated. Lai uses repetition and image recurrence rather than elaborate metaphor. The papaya tree appears four times across the novel in different conditions; this is Lai's primary figurative strategy