House Without Walls
by Ching Yeung Russell (Author)
"A moving and thought-provoking picture of a refugee experience filled with both tragedy and hope."--School Library Journal
House Without Walls has been beautifully rendered in paperback!
Eleven-year-old Lam escapes from Vietnam with her younger brother during the Vietnamese Boat People Exodus in 1979, when people from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia fled their homelands for safety. For Lam, "safety" means joining her father in San Francisco. But the trip to the United States is long and perilous, full of dangerous encounters with pirates and greedy sailors, a lack of food and water, and even the stench of dead bodies. Befriending Nam, Dao, and their parents is a small reprieve from the horror, but the worst is yet to come. . . . Can Lam and her brother survive the refugee camps? Will they be reunited with their father?
Written in verse, House Without Walls is a heartfelt story that is sure to elicit empathy and compassion for refugees around the world escaping oppression.
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School Library Journal
Lam is an 11-year-old Chinese Vietnamese girl who, along with her seven-year-old brother Dee Dee, becomes part of the Boat People Exodus in 1979 Vietnam. They are leaving behind their ma and ah mah to join their baba in America. Lam describes their harrowing journey, detailing their deteriorating conditions and daily fears on the boat, as well as their experiences at refugee camps in Malaysia and Indonesia. Readers will share the children's emotional highs and lows, and witness both the ugliness and beauty of humanity. Told in beautifully written verse from Lam's perspective, this story is a combination of the real-life Lam's journey, accounts told to the author by other refugees, and a bit of imagination. There is a map for context at the beginning of the book and a glossary, with several of those terms italicized throughout. VERDICT A moving and thought-provoking picture of a refugee experience filled with both tragedy and hope.
Copyright 2019 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission
Review quotes
JUV057000 - Juvenile Fiction | Stories in Verse (see also Poetry)
JUV039250 - Juvenile Fiction | Social Themes | Emigration & Immigration
JUV016000 - Juvenile Fiction | Historical | General
