Inside Out & Back Again
Plot: A ten-year-old Vietnamese girl named Young Ha is living in Saigon in 1975. Her father is away fighting in the Vietnam war. She and her family are forced to flee their familiar home and travel to Alabama in the USA. She struggles to fit into her new life.
Settings: Vietnam, Guam, & Alabama
Genre/Theme/Style: Free verse and predominantly non-fiction prose poetry. Written in the voice of a child writing in her diary.
Critical Analysis: This book was written in first person, free verse and attempts to give you the feeling of a childlike voice telling the accounts that are written into a diary.
I wanted to really love this book, and tried hard to get past the child that is pouting because she received dried papaya instead of fresh that threw it in the trash, and the child that uses the grocery money to buy treats while her Mom grows thin, but it was just difficult for me. The main character came across as somewhat self-absorbed at times.
I actually had great sympathy for her Mother and the problems she must have encountered during her displacement and the traumatic sacrifices she made to save her family from Communism.
It bounces back and forth between a child's thoughts and those of an adult, in my opinion. For instance, "All day I practice squeezing hisses through my teeth. Whoever invented English must have loved snakes," sounds like something a child would think and say.
However, "Everyone knows the ship could sink, unable to hold the piles of bodies that keep crawling on like raging ants from a disrupted nest. But no one is heartless enough to say stop because what if they had been stopped before their turn?" This for me does not sound like something a child would think or say.
Rhythm, Rhyme, & Sound: The rhythm and sound changes frequently throughout the book. The book does not attempt to rhyme.
Language: The reader has to pay close attention to the language. It often comes in snippets and spurts of understanding.
Imagery: The imagery is great, and the issues of compassion are important concepts to embrace. It does paint a picture of the hardships of a family trying to fit into a new society.
Emotions: The book is full of emotions. In fact, I think at times there are more emotions than most middle school readers could fully process or really grasp. The mood of the work shifts constantly making it difficult for the reader to follow.
Why 4 Roars? I think this book is really written for older students or adults. I think middle school average readers might miss a lot of the subtle nuances, but still be capable of enjoying parts of story. I think that the average middle school reader might need assistance reading it, due to the way it is written.
I attempted to find book reviews of this book given by middle school readers and most of these reviews gave the book an average of 3 stars out of 5 stars. Many of the teen book reviews I found also rated the book much lower than adult reviewers. For this reason I gave the book 4 Roars, even though as an adult I can appreciate the cultural value, language barriers, and symbolism that makes it award worthy.
Awards:
Newbery Honor Books 2012
#1 New Your Times Bestseller
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