Caged

A young Hmong girl has never been outside the refugee camp where she was born. She spends her days playing with cousins and imagining flight, above the clouds and far from the fences, until her family's papers are approved and the imagined leaving becomes a real one. Yang returns here to the territory of From the Tops of the Trees, but from a child's interior rather than a father's gesture, and the imagining is given as much reality as the camp itself. The title is doing careful work: the cage is named without the book ever becoming despairing, which is a hard balance in a picture book about statelessness. Useful for younger readers approaching the refugee story for the first time, and for adults who need a way to begin the conversation. For ages 4 to 8, and for classroom and library collections.