Tag Archives: 10x10act.org

August 1, 2012 · 9:33 am

The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna

Months (maybe longer) have passed since I finished Aminatta Forna‘s third and latest title, exquisitely narrated by British actor Kobna Holdbrook-Smith. I think I just didn’t want to let it go by posting a review … but here’s the bottom line: stupendous.

Memory has two of the elements I love most about great fiction: multiple perspectives and zig-zagging time, which woven together create a literary puzzle, unsettling in its myriad pieces, luminous once interlocked. The frame is Sierra Leone, and ‘now’ is a time of post civil-war recovery although ongoing violence is never far off; over almost 450 pages, time moves fluidly through some four decades and three generations.

Professor Elias Cole lies in a hospital bed, dying. When he’s able to speak, he shares fragments of his life with Dr. Adrian Lockheart (take notice of that name), a British psychologist with the best intentions, hoping to use his education and experience for good in an unfamiliar country so seemingly alien to his own. One late night, on the doorstep of Adrian’s apartment arrives Dr. Kai Mansaray, a gifted young surgeon who managed to survive the vicious massacres, whose truculent nightmares rarely give him rest, whose closest friend entices him with a new, past-free life in America.

These three learned men, their memories, their presents, become thickly entangled … with each of their memories of love eventually laid bare – vulnerable, betrayed, bloody … and yet always, there is the love. Narrator Kobna Holdbrook-Smith is remarkable in voicing each character, but especially unforgettable in Elias’ dying growl, Adrian’s naive hope, Kai’s wrenching helplessness; their voices haunt, constant reminders of the overwhelming personal price of war.

Thanks to a phenomenal writer and a narrator her dramatic equal, The Memory of Love proves to be a rare, extraordinary, breathtaking experience. I let it go for now … sharing testimony, investing in hope, believing in love.

Readers: Adult

Published: 2011 (United States)

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Filed under ...Absolute Favorites, ..Adult Readers, .Audio, .Fiction, African

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June 4, 2012 · 12:02 pm

Lulu in the Sky: A Daughter of Cambodia Finds Love, Healing, and Double Happiness by Loung Ung + Author Interview

When I recently met Loung Ung in person at one of her Washington, DC readings, we were the lone Asian women in the room. Yes, get ready with your “uh-oh.” Within minutes, a random stranger asked if Ung and I were sisters. Surprisingly, I behaved and politely answered with, “No, Loung and I just met.” To her credit, she did promise to put her glasses back on.

I didn’t embarrass my “sister,” but I did later share the incident, to which she replied, “I got one almost as good.” A would-be reader “asked me if I wrote the book or did I have help?” What Ung wanted to say was, “You think I no write English?” But being in a public setting (and having experienced far worse), Ung merely “got heated but stayed calm,” and graciously replied with, “Yes, I wrote the book… I wrote three books.”

Indeed, that third book is Lulu in the Sky: A Daughter of Cambodia Finds Love, Healing, and Double Happiness, which was published in May, and completes Ung’s trilogy of powerful memoirs. Above all else, Ung is a survivor – a survivor who’s managed to keep her humanity (and humor) intact in spite of enduring unspeakable atrocity. After living the first five years of her life as a privileged, pampered second-to-last daughter – one of seven children – in a large Cambodian Chinese family in Phnom Penh, she spent the next five years trapped in tortuous horror, trying to outrun destruction, war, starvation, and death. During her most formative years, she experienced both the unconditional devotion and courage of her family, and witnessed the most atrociously evil acts of inhumanity.

The United States’ evacuation of Vietnam in April 1975 affected not only Vietnam but neighboring Cambodia and Laos where the so-called Vietnam War spread. With the U.S. troops out of the way, the Communist Khmer Rouge stormed into Cambodia’s capital and largest city Phnom Penh and dispersed its inhabitants; those who survived were sent to forced labor camps where many would die of starvation, disease, torture, and execution. Over the next four years, Pol Pot and his regime claimed 1.7 million lives – a quarter of Cambodia’s then-population.

Half of Ung’s immediate family somehow survived. Those horrific years – from ages 5 to 9 – eventually became her debut memoir, First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers, which quickly becoming a national bestseller after it was published in 2000. Five years later, she followed that success with the critically acclaimed Lucky Child: A Daughter of Cambodia Reunites with the Sister She Left Behind, in which she examines the parallel lives of her own American experiences with those of her one surviving sister who remained in Cambodia. Ung confronts her deep guilt of being the chosen one, the “lucky child,” and finds healing through love, family, and community.

In Lulu in the Sky, Ung is all grown up. Attending a small liberal arts college in Vermont, she begins to navigate her life as an adult, away from the “No dating, no boys” family rules she lived with from age 13. When she meets an easy-going, tall, handsome young man from Ohio, she thinks “Kismet! … I, a brown girl living in the whitest state in America, met the only Caucasian person on campus who had been to my part of the world.” How could she not fall in love with this happy Midwest boy who had spent a year in the Philippines teaching English in a refugee camp? Kismet indeed.

But falling in love – even having that love abundantly returned – is not enough to keep Ung’s fears, nightmares, and bouts of depression away. For 10 uncertain, peripatetic years, Ung will struggle to find peace in her soul and her place amidst her traditional family both near and far. Meanwhile, she needs to discover what fulfills her in the world, and how to reconcile the inhumanity she’s witnessed with the unconditional love she’s been offered.

In an essay at the end of Lulu, you write so poignantly, “If First was about getting lost, being lost, and losing, then Lucky Child was about being found, finding, and gaining.” How might you add Lulu into that description?
Lulu is my journey of going from surviving to thriving… about reconnecting, reclaiming, and rejoicing.

So what’s the backstory with Lulu? What made you write a part three?
Lulu is filled with stories about going back to Cambodia, not only as an activist but as a sister, an aunt, a daughter. I’m coming full circle from being a Chinese Cambodian, which I wrote about in First They Killed My Father; then becoming an American, which became Lucky Child; and now I’m writing about being an international citizen of the world. I’ve loved having all these roles.

Writing this book helped me learn so much about Cambodia on a spiritual and emotional level. It’s also very much about my mother. Lulu came into being one morning when I woke up and found myself crying and cleaning the floor – something I rarely do – and something I’ve never done together! It took me awhile to figure out why I did that: why I was crying when I have such a great life? What I finally realized then was that in one year I was going to outlive my mother; she died when she was 39. And in my mind, I’d always thought that as long as she was alive at this age, at my age, she could exist in another place, living out her life perhaps in a parallel universe. And in this way, we could still be connected, talk to each other, be in each other’s lives.

But what happens to this connection when her lifeline ends? As a daughter, I feared I would lose her all over again, so I began to dig into her story, to learn about her life not only as my mother, my father’s wife, but as a woman, a fully formed human person. The search for my mother really drove me to explore more about the role of who we are as women, who we are as part of the human race. It turned out to be a fun project that I really enjoyed. I think Lulu reflects this; so it’s a lighter story, more hopeful, and humorous. I went into it because of pain, a delayed separation anxiety about losing my mother again. I came out of this journey full of hope and gratitude for a mother’s love, the human heart, and the generosity of people to assist one another in our times of need. [... click here for more]

Author interview: Feature: “An Interview with Loung Ung,” Bookslut.com, June 2012

Readers: Young Adult, Adult

Published: 2012

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February 18, 2012 · 9:34 am

Tropical Fish: Stories Out of Entebbe by Doreen Baingana

This interlinked story collection by Uganda-born, Stateside MFA-ed Doreen Baingana is a family affair that explores the lives of three sisters, their diverse paths, and their eventual return home. The two bookended stories introduce the family in the opening “Green Stones,” only to end with a much changed configuration of residents in the same house years later in “Questions of Home.” In between, the sisters grow up, move away, and make irrevocable choices  …

In the Entebbe home of their youth, Christine, Rosa, and Patti witness the debauched, shameful disintegration of their once-powerful, internationally peripatetic businessman father. Their waiting mother, whose adoration for her husband turns to anger and disgust, endures. Each sister suffers through boarding school: Patti deals with the humiliation of constant hunger in “Hunger,” and Rosa learns the true meaning of ‘passion’ from a less-than-respected literature teacher in “Passion.”

Christine – who emerges as the primary narrator – recalls a disconnected affair with a Caucasian ex-pat living a far more luxurious life that he could ever have had back home in “Tropical Fish,” then explores her own American dream in “Lost in Los Angeles” where she learns to stop giving geography lessons to those too myopic to identify a country called Uganda. Christine’s reverse commute back to Entebbe eight years later in the final “Questions of Home” proves both jarring and familiar.

Set in the tumultuous time following the ouster of Idi Amin (who terrorized Uganda from 1971 to 1979), amidst the delicate reconstruction of a country in flux, Baingana creates an unflinching portrait of four women, who each claim their independence in different ways, but eventually come back together – much changed, one missing – to be a family once again.

Beyond Baingana’s well-deserved initial success – including the 2003 AWP Award Series in Short Fiction from the all-encompassing literary organization Association of Writers & Writing Programs, and the 2006 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book in Africa – Fish remains her single title. The prowess of that debut, however, should ensure that she is an international writer to watch with great anticipation. Anyone with a direct line to her … do please tell her that her public is waiting, waiting, waiting!

Tidbit: Tropical Fish remains very much in the news! The collection was recently chosen as the Port Harcourt, Nigeria-based Rainbow Book Club pick-of-the-month. Doreen Baingana will be reading in Port Harcourt at the Le Meridien Hotel, Ogeyi Palace tomorrow, February 19, 2012 at 4 p.m.! Wish I could be there!

Readers: Adult

Published: 2005, 2006 (new paperback edition with additional preface and discussion guide)

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January 9, 2012 · 12:42 pm

Beneath the Lion’s Gaze by Maaza Mengiste + Author Interview

Maaza Mengiste‘s voice, delivered by telephone many thousands of miles away, sounds impossibly young and happy. She’s easy to talk to, easy to laugh with. She’s in Rome for another few months, enjoying the spring sun, sipping another cup of tea in a nearby café, and watching the many American tourists wandering by.

Her idyllic life for the moment seems at odds with her own early past — filled with uncertainty, inexplicable violence, and constant fear. Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Maaza was just 3 years old when the 1974 Ethiopian revolution broke out, ousting a 3,000-year-old monarchy and replacing it with the brutal Derg regime that destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives before its collapse in 1991. Maaza was too young to understand what was happening, but perceptive enough to retain shattering images of that horrific time that have stayed with her through the years. Decades later, Maaza pieced together those memories to write her award-winning, critically acclaimed debut novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, published in early 2010.

At the core of Maaza’s searing work are one family’s hellish experiences during the 1974 revolution. The family’s patriarch — the good doctor Hailu — is a prominent, proud man highly trained to alleviate pain, cure illness, and save the dying. And yet he can do nothing for his beloved wife who lies in a hospital bed, shriveled, exhausted, and ready to pass on. Hailu’s elder son Yonas gravely tries to hold his family together, but is himself helpless when his young daughter becomes seriously ill and his wife Sara is crushed by the fear of potential loss.

Unlike the controlled, watchful Yonas, Hailu’s younger son Dawit is still idealistic, still fueled by a rash temper that once put a fellow student in the hospital when Dawit, too young to understand rape, witnessed that student committing a vicious crime against a family servant. Dawit is devoted to his dying mother, emotionally dependent on his sister-in-law Sara, and in love with a headstrong young woman. He looks on in anguish and disgust as the new regime claims his childhood best friend, who uses complicity as a way to escape his deprived past spent in a mud shack adjacent to the luxury of Hailu’s two-story home.

The revolution shatters the family’s lives: Hailu’s humanity, Yonas’ responsibility, Dawit’s ideals will all be tested. As if working pieces of an intricate puzzle, Maaza presents an epic historical moment too few of us know of, laying the most atrocious acts next to radiantly tender moments and juxtaposing utter cowardice with utmost bravery. The result proves unforgettable.

Based on the strength of that single novel, Maaza was chosen by the 10×10 team to write the Ethiopian chapter of the 10×10 documentary film. Her enthusiasm about the project is palpable, and she admits she is most excited about connecting to the Ethiopian girls. Almost shyly, she reveals her own experiences when, at age 7, she left the comfort of her family to escape the growing danger of remaining in Ethiopia and traveled alone to the United States as a tiny refugee. For over a decade, she grew up in a group home run by a Christian couple in a small town in Colorado: “No one has ever heard of it; it’s on the border with Kansas,” she says. She remained there, living with a revolving group of other refugees, until she graduated high school and left for college.

Maaza softly admits to her isolated youth as “difficult, and I wouldn’t want to wish it on anyone.” She adds, “maybe that’s why I feel so connected to the plight of children.” [... click here for more: author interview appears on pages 5-11]

Author interview: 10×10: Educate Girls, Change the World Book Club Kit, April 2011, pages 5-11

Readers: Adult

Published: 2010

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December 13, 2011 · 1:58 pm

Seasons of Flight by Manjushree Thapa

Nepal-born Manjushree Thapa, herself a peripatetic hybrid of East and West with an American education and Canadian ties, is one of a handful of Nepali authors successfully writing in English. This, her latest novel (and only her second in her almost two-decade writing history with seven titles thus far), is not yet published in the U.S., although thanks to our global economy, it’s readily available through various virtual outlets. While the book itself has not yet officially landed with a U.S. press, Flight – ironically – is essentially an immigration story, enhanced with resonating layers of political and socioeconomic history.

“Why were Americans so light of spirit?” Prema, a young woman from Nepal, asks herself again and again. Having survived her war-torn, unstable homeland where loved ones die and disappear, Prema’s adjustment to her new life in Los Angeles is a wholly different kind of challenge.

Trained in forestry – in things that might change with the seasons, but are ultimately rooted – Prema’s life in her native hill village is not enough to keep her grounded: her mother died in childbirth when Prema was 8, that younger sister who survived went missing years ago to join the rebel Maoists, her father is little more than a kind voice on a public telephone, her lover is as noncommittal as Prema herself. When she is granted a U.S. green card via lottery, she readily flees toward a chance for a “life in a richer land [that] was more – proper, solid.”

But in the multi-ethnic metropolis that is Los Angeles, Prema finds herself repeatedly trying to explain that she is not Indian, and she doesn’t speak Spanish because she is not Mexican/Italian/Spanish, that ‘Nepal’ is not the same as Nippon nor does it sound like ‘nipple’ and surely it has no relation to Naples or pasta. Untethered, Prema eschews relationships with fellow Nepali emigres, and cuts off contact with her waiting father and unattached lover. She moves in with total strangers, cares for a wealthy elderly widow most days, and finds herself alone most nights … until she meets Luis, who becomes her tenuous connection to a firmer, more grounded American life, at least for a while. But reinvention, even thousands of miles away, requires more than physical distance.

In a poignant twist, Thapa subtly compares the two sisters’ lives – eight years and countries apart. As spare as those passages are, their markedly diverging circumstances and experiences speak volumes, giving this not-so-simple immigration story keen insight into the cost of leaving, and the price for going back.

Readers: Adult

Published: 2010 (India, United Kingdom)

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August 2, 2011 · 7:19 pm

Chanda’s Secrets by Allan Stratton

If it hasn’t happened already, soon enough Chanda’s Secrets will be coming to a theater near you … it arrives Friday, August 5, if you happen to live in the DC metro area. As internationally lauded as the film version – titled Life, Above All – has been, no celluloid version could possibly capture the breadth and depth between the pages of Canadian writer Allan Stratton‘s 2005 Michael L. Printz Honor Book for Excellence in Young Adult Literature. Do yourself a favor: Read, then see …

In the small town of Tiro in a fictional southern African country, 16-year-old Chanda is the oldest child living at home with her mother and three younger siblings. Her beloved father died in a horrible mine accident years before, and since then, her mother has been unlucky in her subsequent relationships, each producing another child. Yet regardless of her personal struggles, Mama has always managed to be a resilient, devoted, caring parent … until now.

When Chanda’s baby sister dies, the family quickly begins to unravel. The baby’s father, an alcoholic lothario, rarely bothers to come home and soon enough disappears. What seems to begin as utter grief saps Mama’s strength, until she can no longer rise from her sleeping mat. Mama insists that the only way she can recover is to make peace with her estranged family, so she travels to her home village leaving Chanda in charge with promises of a swift return. With all the crushing illness around her, Chanda must face the secret that no one dares to name.

With the support of her best friend Esther, who lost both parents to the unnamable disease, the sometimes begrudging love of Mrs. Tafa next door, and the guidance of her highly respected high school teacher, Chanda confronts the town’s ignorance and crushing judgments, and breaks the taboo silence demanded of HIV/AIDS victims. Unlike the silently complicit victims’ families, Chanda openly decides what is best for her family, especially for her frail mother.

In spite of the multiplying illness and deaths throughout, Stratton’s unforgettable story is driven by courage and abundant hope. Chanda’s education plays a pivotal role in her capable decisions and justice-fueled demands. Amidst excruciating choices and impossible challenges, she manages to hold on to her dreams of scholarship and degrees … and while no easy fairy tale ending awaits, Chanda’s inspiring determination will make you believe she’ll someday, somehow accomplish all.

Read …then see … then read some more: Chanda’s story continues in Chanda’s Wars.

Readers: Middle Grade, Young Adult

Published: 2004

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July 9, 2011 · 4:05 pm

Mud City by Deborah Ellis

The final installment of Canadian activist/author Deborah Ellis‘ award-winning Breadwinner Trilogy follows Shauzia, Parvana’s best friend from The Breadwinner, in which both girls survived by cross-dressing as young boys, working to provide for their shuttered-in families in Taliban-controlled Kabul. While Parvana’s desperate odyssey to reunite with her family continues in Parvana’s Journey, Shauzia’s story takes her to a refugee camp in Pakistan, just beyond the Afghanistan border.

Shauzia shares a tent with Mrs. Weera, a domineering woman who was once the girls’ athletics teacher, who is now involved with running secret schools, clinics, and publishing a feminist magazine. Shauzia is tired of doing “little jobs” for Mrs. Weera, being ordered around, feeling suffocated in the refugee camp. Inspired by a magazine cut-out of a lavendar field somewhere in France, Shauzia dreams of faraway escape. Filled with defiant independence, Shauzia heads to the busy city of Peshawar with her loyal dog, Jasper, expecting to find enough work to pay her passage to freedom, away from hunger, suffering, war, and especially Mrs. Weera’s endless demands.

Supporting herself, of course, proves to be far more difficult than she ever expected. She finds a few odd jobs, but must resort to theft, begging, and running with hardened street kids in hopes of staying as safe as possible. She lands in jail, is saved by an ex-pat American family, but her respite is brief and she finds herself back where she started. How she will ever achieve her dreams seems to be a daunting, neverending challenge.

Of the trilogy, Mud City, is admittedly the weakest (less developed characters, the American deus ex machina gone awry), although only in comparison to the previous two titles. Certainly Mud could stand alone, but reading all three is more rewarding, enriched by the many small details that bind the three stories together.

Although the trilogy is seemingly finished, adding a final fourth which captures Shauzia and Parvana’s reunion would surely be welcome … indeed, those promised 20 years have nearly passed. Book 1 is set sometime in or close to 1996 (when the Taliban claimed Kabul), and books 2 and 3 about three years later (Parvana is 14 in Journey). Already, we’re in 2011, so somehow, the two cross-dressing girls – now fully grown women – are due for reunion at the Eiffel Tower’s peak in just five short years … oh, to imagine that …!

Readers: Middle Grade

Published: 2003

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July 8, 2011 · 5:45 pm

Parvana’s Journey by Deborah Ellis

The second part of Canadian anti-war activist Deborah Ellis‘ lauded Breadwinner Trilogy continues with Parvana’s odyssey to reunite with her surviving family. Parvana and her recently released father leave Kabul at the end of The Breadwinner, determined to find Parvana’s mother, older sister, younger sister, and toddler brother who traveled north for her older sister’s wedding.

Journey begins with harsh tragedy … at the graveside of Parvana’s father. Parvana is still traveling as Kaseem, but at 14, she will not be able to hide her true gender much longer. The villagers are initially welcoming of Parvana, but soon she must escape in the middle of the night after being warned that she is about to be sold to the Taliban.

All alone and not even certain of where she is going, Parvana recites multiplication tables, just as her father taught her, to keep her going during the most trying times. Barely able to take care of her own self, Parvana’s wanderings lead her to a struggling baby in a bombed-out village whose dead mother lies beside him, then an angry, abused young boy who has already lost a leg, and finally an imaginative little girl who believes she is forever safe from land mines that litter the damaged, broken, war-torn country. Together, the foursome form a new kind of family …

Parvana shares not only her strength and protection with the younger children, she also tries to impart her hard-won education, teaching her new siblings to read and write. She writes undeliverable letters as often as she can to her friend Shauzia, who also survived life in Kabul as a cross-dressing breadwinner for her family, with whom Parvana shares the secret promise of meeting at the top of the Eiffel Tower in (now less than) 20 years.

In spite of the endless difficulties she faces, Parvana holds on to her father’s beloved books as long as she can, as well as the single copy of a feminist magazine her mother helped to write and produce before the family was scattered. Parvana is determined she will not only find her missing family … but she will one day put her mother’s brave, banned work into her waiting hands.

Ellis creates another challenging, fast-moving story about the will to survive, even in the youngest, most vulnerable souls. The children’s ability to nurture one another even as adults prove unreliable provide moments of uplifting wonder. Truly, the future lies in children … their resilience, their determination, their forgiveness, and their awe-inspiring hope.

Readers: Middle Grade

Published: 2002

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July 6, 2011 · 9:57 am

The Breadwinner by Deborah Ellis

When Parvana’s gentle father is suddenly beaten without cause and locked away for being an educated citizen, her family is left without a means to support themselves. Under Taliban rule, women are forbidden in Kabul to leave the house unless fully covered and accompanied by a male family member. The only male at home now is Parvana’s toddler brother, hardly a likely escort. Meanwhile, their bereft mother – a former radio journalist – cannot get out of bed. Her teenage older sister is a perfect target for kidnapping.

At 11, Parvana is still young enough to dress in her late older brother’s leftover clothing, even if her resemblance to Hossain makes her mother weep. Masquerading as a boy, Parvana can leave the family’s stifling one-room apartment to go to the market, take over her father’s job as a letter-reader-and-writer-for hire, to buy food, and feed her family. As “Kaseem,” she becomes the family’s breadwinner.

In spite of her new relative freedom, Parvana – nor her family – is hardly safe, and they must struggle daily to survive, holding on to the hope of a family reunion someday. The Breadwinner is the first of a trilogy that continues in Parvana’s Journey and Mud City – all three chronicle the extreme choices Parvana and her family are forced to make amidst the cruel Taliban control of their war-torn country.

Award-winning Deborah Ellis – one of Canada’s most popular, bestselling children’s authors – is a longtime anti-war activist who traveled to Afghan refugee camps in the late 1990s and “heard many stories like Parvana’s.” Honoring those experiences of struggle, Ellis is donating all royalties from The Breadwinner to Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan – even more reason to invest in her books!

Ellis strongly reminds readers in her ending “Author’s Note” that in spite of the Taliban’s initial ousting in 2001 from Afghanistan, “the future of Afghanistan’s women and girls remains uncertain.” A full decade later, that future remains under threat. In the words of the looming Talib soldier, toting a rifle to complete his menacing shadow, “‘Read this.’”

Readers: Middle Grade

Published: 2001 (United States)

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July 5, 2011 · 9:48 am

The Clay Marble by Minfong Ho

Twelve-year-old Dara, her older brother, and their mother are the only ones left of their once-large family. Although the Vietnam War officially ended in 1975, neighboring Cambodia – decimated by Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge regime – is still plagued with uncontrolled violence. Dara’s diminished family flees their village to a refugee camp on the Thai-Cambodian border, where they find a near-instant connection with another splintered family.

Dara is especially drawn to Jantu, one year older, whose remarkable talent for creating dolls, toys, whole imaginative worlds out of almost nothing – even muddy clay! – binds the two girls tightly together. When both families are forced to flee yet again, Dara, Jantu, and her injured little brother become separated in the chaos. Fueled by the magic Dara believes Jantu has blown into a special clay marble, Dara tenaciously struggles to reunite both parts of her new family.

Minfong Ho‘s preface reveals her own personal journey guided by a magical clay marble, when she temporarily left college to volunteer with an international relief agency, setting up feeding programs for children in Thai-Cambodian border refugee camps. “I remember my first day at the Border,” she writes. “There are no words to describe the intensity of suffering I saw there. … I wanted to shut my eyes, turn around, and go back home.” But she didn’t.

What kept Ho from leaving was “a ragged little girl,” who offered her “a small round ball of mud”  … complete with “a beautiful wide smile.” The laughter of the children that gathered around made Ho see that these refugees were “not the victims of war but its victors.” Although Ho doesn’t know what happened to the little girl – “life could not have been easy for her” – she can still “hope with all [her] heart that the little girl who gave [her] that first clay marble is safe and happy, home in Cambodia.”

Perhaps the spirit of that smiling little girl lives in on Dara’s story, a lingering magic that gives her the strength and determination to continue to survive … and decades later, to thrive.

Readers: Middle Grade

Published: 1991

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