THE ILLITERATE DAUGHTER

A teenager and her family attempt to escape war-torn Laos in this debut YA novel.

Laos, 1974. Thirteen-year-old Nou has two books she desperately wants to read. Unfortunately, she doesn’t yet know how. Nou needs the Vietnam War—which has spilled into her homeland of Laos—to end before she can finally attend school and learn to decipher the characters that line the volumes’ pages. Until then, she is stuck weeding the family’s rice field and feeding the livestock, daydreaming about the princes and princesses she hopes to one day read about. Then the unimaginable happens. The Communists attack Nou’s Hmong village, burning down houses and slaughtering civilians: “Our hut began to burn, and my heart stopped a second time. My books! Oh Heaven….Our dog, my books, and everything we had worked for, gone in the blink of an eye.” Nou’s wounded father, who fought beside the Americans, leads the family members into the jungle, knowing that if the Communists catch them, he will be killed. As Nou and her family brave the deadly mountain paths that will provide an escape into Thailand, hounded all the way by Communist soldiers, the only way for the girl to keep the clan together may be for her to become one of the heroes she’s long daydreamed about. In this series opener, Vang’s prose is precise and urgent, capturing the moment-to-moment anxieties of Nou on her journey: “We marched cautiously and quietly on the steep, craggy mountain path. Birds sang cheerfully from the tree canopy as if no danger existed and helped distract me from my fear. Still, with every rustle of leaves and grunts or shuffling of wild animals, my heart fluttered.” The novel moves swiftly and nimbly, introducing its appealing characters and quickly sending them crashing into the undergrowth. In addition to telling the under-reported history of American-Hmong involvement in the Laotian civil war, the tale offers a timely story of the difficulties faced by war refugees. The trials faced by Nou and her family will linger with readers long after the book’s finale. The audience will be thankful that a sequel is in the works.

A lean and engaging tale about love, war, and family.