A young Vietnamese boy and his family flee Vietnam in search of a better life.Along with co-author Skrypuch, Vietnamese-Canadian Ho recounts his family's flight from Vietnam in 1981. At the book's outset, 6-year-old Ho returns home from school to learn that he, his mother, and his two older sisters will leave Vietnam that very night. Each hour of the Ho family's flight is fraught with danger. Soldiers shoot at them on the beach when they make a run toward a skiff. Their boat springs a leak, and soon after, the motor dies, leaving 60 passengers adrift in the middle of the sea with little water and food. Throughout the harrowing passage, Ho's mother is by his side, comforting him. On the sixth day of their four-day journey, an American aircraft carrier spots their boat and offers the Vietnamese passengers refuge. Skrypuch and Ho's retelling focuses mostly on actions and events with scant attention to the 6-year-old boy's emotional state. The primary narrative provides little context for readers who are unfamiliar with the Vietnamese refugee crisis, but detailed authors' notes include history, photographs, and maps. The warm undertones in Deines' oil paintings evoke tropical Vietnam. However, his soft, slightly out-of-focus images give Ho's story a dreamlike feel that dampens the danger recounted within the text, according readers a luxury not afforded to Ho and the legions of other refugee children suffering through crisis, then and now. An adequate introduction to the Vietnamese refugee journey for young readers (Picture book. 7-10)

Skrypuch (Last Airlift, 2012) joins Ho in the telling of this tense but true story of his family's escape from postwar Vietnam in 1981. Photographs of the family bookend the story and remind readers that the painful events, rendered so softly in oil paint so as to be almost dreamlike, actually happened to real people. Young Tuan Ho narrates this perilous escape, describing his pain at leaving behind a younger sister, fear of losing loved ones, and incredulous relief upon being rescued by an American aircraft carrier after six days adrift on the ocean. The text is terse and unembellished, leaving the images to capture the emotions through color and perspective d they do so with compelling immediacy. A brief account in the back matter provides some context for the flight of so many Vietnamese "boat people" after the communist government took over. This book may be inaccessible for young readers but could be an interesting supplement to a middle-school curriculum about war, displacement, or survival. Pair with LaTisha Redding's Calling the Water Drum (2016).

Gr 1-4 A personal account of one family's escape from Vietnam following the fall of Saigon. Ho, only six years old at the time, tells a remarkable tale of perseverance that involved attacks from soldiers, a broken boat at sea, and a trip that was intended to last four days but went horribly awry. Amazingly, throughout the harrowing journey, his family remained intact. "It's hard to find a place to sit, but finally we huddle together, clutching hands and falling asleep to the lullaby of slapping waves and the growl of the motor." Back matter includes family photographs, maps, and a historical note about the Vietnam War and the resulting refugee crisis, which makes this title helpful for discussing the topics of relocation and the history of refugee placement. The narrative, while gripping, includes vocabulary words like skiff, bailing, adrift, and tethers that young children unfamiliar with sailing are unlikely to recognize. Deines's illustrations, created with oil paint on canvas, provide some contextual background but have a muted palette and tend to minimize the story's emotion and sense of urgency. VERDICT This is a solid informational resource that can be used for introducing a refugee's experience. Megan Egbert, Meridian Library District, ID