Where Rivers Part

Kao Kalia Yang's third memoir hands the microphone to her mother. Chue Moua was a girl in Laos when the Secret War reached her village, and the book follows her through flight, hunger, the Thai camps, marriage into the Yang family, and the long resettlement into Minnesota. Yang writes it in her mother's first person, a formal choice that does real work: it refuses the daughter's distance and makes the reader sit inside a life rather than beside it. Read alongside The Latehomecomer, which told the family's story from the daughter's vantage, and The Song Poet, which belonged to her father, this completes a trilogy of one family narrated three ways. It belongs on this shelf as the fullest account in English of what the war did to Hmong women specifically, whose experience of the same history is rarely the one written down. For adult readers, book clubs, and anyone teaching refugee literature.