A Hmong Family

Written for young readers, and unusually concrete about it. Nora Murphy sets out who the Hmong are and where they come from, then follows one family out of Laos and into the work of rebuilding a life in America, closing with a Hmong folktale. The single-family frame is what makes it work at this age: the history arrives attached to people a child can hold onto rather than as a sequence of dates. It is one of the few books on this shelf pitched at the middle years, between the picture books and the memoirs, and it has held up as a classroom staple since 1997. Some details of American resettlement now read as historical. For ages 8 to 12, school libraries, and teachers introducing the Hmong to a class.