This moving bilingual picture book, from an author and artist who are both Vietnamese American, tells a contemporary immigrant story, not of child refugees coming to America, but of a child of those refugees visiting, for the first time, the country her parents still call home. For Ami Chi, eight years old, home is the U.S. She doesn't want to fly to Vietnam and meet her grandmother (ba ngoai ). It's too hot there, Ba ngoai's house is too small, and Ami Chi can't understand what anyone around her says. But then she makes a friend who speaks English, and by the time she returns to the U.S., she recognizes that she is both Vietnamese and American. Phong's richly colored, double-page acrylic paintings capture both the child's dislocation in the strange crowds and the contrast between the two worlds she now knows. Most eloquent is the beautiful close-up of Ami Chi combing Grandmother's hair. Immigrant kids everywhere will recognize the space across generations and the idea that home is not one place.

PreS-Gr 2 Eight-year-old Ami Chi makes her first trip to Vietnam, her parents' homeland, and stays with her uncle and grandmother. The heat, the small house, and her inability to understand the language make the child long to return home to Americauntil she visits a market, makes a friend there, and develops a closeness with her grandmother. She realizes that "Home is two different places, on the left and right sides of my heart." Told through Ami Chi's eyes, the story occasionally lapses into a poetic, adult voice. The impressionistic illustrations, done in acrylic paint on rag paper, fill the entire spread, with the bilingual text sometimes all on one side and sometimes divided between the two pages. Facial features are often missing from people in the background; mouths, when present, are sometimes strangely drawn. It's unfortunate that the objects in the market and on city streets lack a sharp focus; the art fails to provide an interesting look at the country and its culture. That said, this title is still a useful addition for Vietnamese-Americans traveling to their native land with children. Diane S. Marton, Arlington County Library, VA