House Without Walls

Most people imagine ＂home＂ as a safe, warm place with four walls. But for child refugees Lam and Dee Dee escaping Vietnam, ＂home＂ is ever-changing and often doesn’t have any walls at all.

＂A moving and thought-provoking picture of a refugee experience filled with both tragedy and hope.＂--School Library Journal

House Without Walls has been beautifully rendered in paperback!

Eleven-year-old Lam escapes from Vietnam with her younger brother during the Vietnamese Boat People Exodus in 1979, when people from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia fled their homelands for safety. For Lam, ＂safety＂ means joining her father in San Francisco. But the trip to the United States is long and perilous, full of dangerous encounters with pirates and greedy sailors, a lack of food and water, and even the stench of dead bodies. Befriending Nam, Dao, and their parents is a small reprieve from the horror, but the worst is yet to come. . . . Can Lam and her brother survive the refugee camps? Will they be reunited with their father?

Written in verse, House Without Walls is a heartfelt story that is sure to elicit empathy and compassion for refugees around the world escaping oppression.

Ching Yeung Russell is a seasoned, award-winning author of many middle grade novels, including First Apple, Tofu Quilt, and Bungee Cord Hair. She was raised in China, where she was inspired to write after being told by her friend that she could eat more bowls of ＂dan lai＂--a hard-to-get, sweet-milk custard she loved--if she became an author. She left China for Hong Kong when she was 12 years old. Ching has been friends with the real-life Lam and Dee Dee since 1986. She combined their refugee journey with the details and stories she heard while visiting a Vietnamese refugee camp in Hong Kong.