The Diamond Explorer

Yang's first novel for middle-grade readers. Malcolm is the youngest child of Hmong refugees, born more than a decade after his nearest sibling, which leaves him half inside his family's history and half outside it. The book moves between his American life and the world of his ancestors, and the gap between the two is the story. This is a different register from Yang's memoirs, and a useful one for this catalog: Hmong American children have had picture books and their parents have had memoirs, with comparatively little written for the years in between. Malcolm's particular loneliness, being the one who did not live any of it and is still expected to carry it, will be familiar to a lot of second- and third-generation readers. For ages 8 to 12, for school libraries, and for families reading together across generations.