Little Cricket

The Secret War and its aftermath written as a novel for middle-grade readers, published by Hyperion in 2004. Twelve-year-old Kia Yang — Little Cricket — is living with her extended family in a Laotian village when North Vietnamese soldiers destroy much of it and the family flees. After three years in a Thai camp comes the news that splits them: only Kia, her brother Xigi, and their grandfather have been cleared to go to Minnesota. What follows is the isolation of a girl who has arrived without her mother, without the language, and without the village, and it is not resolved quickly. This catalog is thin on Hmong fiction for this age, and thinner still on books that let a child character carry the war rather than remember it secondhand. For ages 9 to 13, for school libraries, and for readers who have finished the picture books and are not ready for the memoirs.