From the Tops of the Trees

Winner of the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. Young Kalia has never seen anything beyond the fences of Ban Vinai, the Thai camp where thousands of Hmong families waited after the Secret War, and she asks her father whether the whole world is a refugee camp. He carries her to the top of the tallest tree so she can see that it is not. The book turns on that single gesture, and Yang lets it stand without explanation. It is the most direct account in this catalog of camp life written for children, and it does the difficult thing of being honest about confinement while leaving a child reader with a father's answer rather than a historian's. Read it before The Rock in My Throat, which picks up after resettlement. For ages 5 to 9, and for classrooms teaching the refugee experience.