Marsh’s uneven account provides a valuable glimpse into immigrant life and what it means to leave one’s homeland and start...
The true story of a Vietnamese family that immigrates to the United States and the terror, heartbreak and joy they experience along the way.
In 1980, 9-year-old Mai Tran and her brother Hieu, 15, manage to escape communist Vietnam by boat, only to endure a long, harrowing trip to nearby Malaysia. Stuck there for six months as they await visas to America, the siblings learn the skillful and sometimes dangerous art of survival by all means necessary. Ultimately, they reunite with their father and other family members in America to begin a new life. Marsh tells the story from Mai’s perspective, so the reader is placed in the unique position of watching Mai grow from a shy little girl into a sophisticated young woman in a strange, new world as she struggles to find balance between Vietnamese traditions and a modern American life. Before she arrives, Mai envisions the United States as a land of great wealth and opportunity, and she’s initially delighted by its creature comforts—running water, toilets and shopping malls, among them. New customs and fashions intrigue her; she had never before worn underwear or celebrated Halloween. But as she grows older, Mai sees that life in her adopted homeland is more complicated than she imagined. While Mai’s story is compelling, Marsh’s storytelling can fall a bit flat and the dialogue may strike some readers as a bit too rudimentary. When asked if she’s looking forward to school starting, Mai responds, “Yes. I didn’t fail second grade, so I’m in the third grade now.” However, Marsh’s attention to detail serves the story well, particularly in evoking memorable suspense like Mai’s near drowning as she attempts to leave Vietnam.
Marsh’s uneven account provides a valuable glimpse into immigrant life and what it means to leave one’s homeland and start over in a foreign country.Pub Date: April 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-0557987993
Page Count: 278
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
