Inside Out & Back Again

Inside Out & Back Again is a verse novel by Thanhha Lai, published in 2011 and awarded that year's National Book Award for Young People's Literature and one of the two Newbery Honors. The novel is based on the author's own first year in the United States as a ten-year-old who spoke no English in 1975.

The story is told in free verse. Hà's account begins with the new year celebrations in South Vietnam while the war is still being fought, and the plot follows the collapse of the government, the family's departure from school and home, and the evacuation itself, which took place on 30 April 1975 with the family reaching Guam on 28 May.

The choice of form matters to how the material is handled. Short poems allow a child's attention to move between the political situation and ordinary details without the narrative having to explain more than she can know, and the book's title describes the two halves of the experience: leaving one country and being returned to school in another without the language. The author was ten in 1975, the same age as her narrator, which is why the book stays inside what a child would have noticed.