Richie’s Picks: A YEAR WITHOUT HOME
Richie Partington
Richie’s Picks: A YEAR WITHOUT HOME by V.T. Bidania, Penguin Random House/Nancy Paulsen, January 2026, 432p., ISBN: 978-0-593-69720-7
“The UN education agency, UNESCO, says that the bombing of a primary school during the US and Israeli military attacks on Iran on Saturday constitutes a grave violation of humanitarian law.”
(3/1/26)
"’A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will,’ Trump said in a post on Truth Social.” (4/7/26)
“Call it peace or call it treason
Call it love or call it reason
But I ain’t a-marching anymore”
– Phil Ochs (1965)
Candlelight
(May 14, before dawn)
When I wake,
it’s so early,
it feels like
the middle of the night.
A chorus or crickets
trills outside our door.
A noisy river toad
croaks
by the stream.
The smell of incense
floats toward me.
I follow it to the family alter
where Dad stands,
holding incense sticks in his hands.
Ribbons of smoke
curl from the tips of the incense,
sending messages to my grandfather
and our ancestors.
Dad is asking
for their protection and guidance
during our journey.
Like me and everyone else
he’s sad to leave too.
Hurry, Mom says
when she spots me
in the shadows.
I rush back to our room,
lift my sisters from the bed,
help them dress by candlelight.
Yia is already up,
peeking out at the black sky.
He turns to me.
What if we don’t come back?
I don’t know.
What if we never find
another place like this?
What he means is
another place
like home.
But I can’t answer Yia
because I’m asking myself
the very same thing,”
It is now a half-century since the end of the Vietnam War and the subsequent Communist takeover of Laos. Based on her research and the true stories of her family’s experience (which she was too young to remember firsthand), author V.T. Bidania weaves an often close-call, breath-holding tale about a family’s panicked departure from Laos, and time spent in one Thailand refugee camp, and then another one. The story concludes with a joyful reunification in
America.
The tale’s narrator is eleven-year-old firstborn Gao Sheng. She is an enthusiastic scholar, a responsible big sister to her three little sisters, and close to Yia, the one boy among the siblings. Their father was among the Hmong working with the CIA and fighting alongside the Americans in Vietnam and now, in the wake of the Communist takeover, he is a marked man. Leaving behind their home in the northern mountains of Laos, leaving the family dog and horse, the main character’s extended family faces dangers but a group of them make it in one piece to the Nam Phong Refugee Camp in Thailand. The whereabouts of other family members remains a mystery.
It’s tough when a new best friend and her family eventually depart the camp, having been sponsored for resettlement in America; it's even harder when family members are chosen to leave. Gao Sheng’s father has hopes of being able to return home to Laos, but he eventually sees the writing on the wall and they are chosen to travel to a new home in the U.S..
With Trump’s war of choice overshadowing the world, and a mandatory U.S. draft registration set to begin later this year. A YEAR WITHOUT HOME is a seriously relevant, powerful, coming-of-age story for tweens. It reveals the human toll to be paid by innocent people and children, thanks to those leaders of countries, sects, gangs, or whatever, who, for their own reasons, or for no good reason, choose to initiate hostilities and move us all another generation away from the Sixties dream of world peace I embraced in my own tween days,.
A YEAR WITHOUT HOME is a book to embrace.
Richie Partington, MLIS
Richie's Picks http://richiespicks.pbworks.com