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Mar 29, 2020brangwinn rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
I’ve been to Vietnam. I’ve read a lot about Vietnam, and yet I learned so much about what the Vietnamese people have been through in reading this fictional account told through the eyes of a young girl and her grandmother. The story moves between periods of tie. Readers are introduced to the duo in Hanoi, during the “American War”. It moves back in time through the grandmother’s stories to life before WWII, the Japanese invasion, and ends up in the 1980’s when the grandmother is finally reunited with her children. This is a gut-wrenching story of how tough the Vietnamese had to be in order to survive. When I visited Vietnam in 2016, I was amazed at how the Buddhist concept of compassion has helped the country heal. This book shows this over and over. For me, an American, whose classmates were going off to fight in Vietnam, I had no idea, that there was a Vietnam that was there before the war. I know there are still nine months in 2020, but I am sure this will be one of the best books I read all year long.