Listen, Slowly in Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge

May 19, 2015 Rincey rated it liked it

Shelves: poc-author, 2015

This is a really solid middle grade novel, but I may have really enjoyed this because it reminded me a lot of myself when I was younger. I saw a lot of myself in Mai, particularly my experiences traveling to India and trying to communicate with my relatives their with their broken English and my broken Malayalam and eating the delicious food and dealing with the different world in so many ways. It really just gave me a lot of nostalgia feels.

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Jan 25, 2016 Molly rated it it was amazing

Shelves: middle-grade, 5-stars, recommended, borrowed, realistic-fiction, ya-lit, i-want-to-go-to-there, book-riot-finds, read-in-2016, read-harder-2016

Oh my goodness, I absolutely loved this! I will admit that I picked it up solely because I needed a Southeast Asian author for my Read Harder challenge (and I read Sorcerer to the Crown a few months ago). Mai (or Mia, stateside) is a 12-year-old California girl who wants nothing more than to spend her summer at the beach with her friends, hopefully working up the nerve to talk to...HIM. Instead, just when school lets out, she finds herself flying to Vietnam with her grandmother, on a mission to Oh my goodness, I absolutely loved this! I will admit that I picked it up solely because I needed a Southeast Asian author for my Read Harder challenge (and I read Sorcerer to the Crown a few months ago). Mai (or Mia, stateside) is a 12-year-old California girl who wants nothing more than to spend her summer at the beach with her friends, hopefully working up the nerve to talk to...HIM. Instead, just when school lets out, she finds herself flying to Vietnam with her grandmother, on a mission to find out what happened to her grandfather during the Vietnam War. There’s this whole thing with a detective, who tracked down the guard who held Ong prisoner, and possibly a message that Ong left, or maybe Ong is still alive...long story short, Ba is old and needs closure on what did or didn’t happen to her husband 45 years earlier. I’m still kind of unclear on why, exactly, the detective cared about all of this in the first place, but Mai’s father is concerned that the detective is trying to fleece his mother, and plus he goes to Vietnam every summer to do pro-bono work. Lucky Mai gets to babysit grandma.

Mai is a great narrator -- her voice is totally accurate to that of a teenaged girl. And she’s a great reader proxy -- yes, she’s Vietnamese, but she’s totally Americanized. She can barely speak the language. I find it interesting that Mai understand Vietnamese best when she hears it (for instance, she can understand most of what Ba says because Ba speaks slowly and uses only words Mai knows), but she can’t read it, and she describes her speech as “Tarzan-like”. I feel like hearing a language is the hardest way to understand it...but I also know squat about Vietnamese! Thanks to her translator (who learned English in Texas, so he has a southern accent, which is hilarious), Mai -- and the reader -- learns more about the language: what all of those “little marks” mean, for instance. There’s a great scene where she’s learning all of the different ways to pronounce “Ba” (depending on the accent mark) and she compares each sound to the kind of sheep she resembles. Funny and accessible for a middle-school audience!

As a whole, the book would bring up some great talking points as a literature circle. I thought it might make a good read aloud, but there’s so much about the different pronunciations and accent markings, that I feel like it’s better to actually read it yourself (or perhaps hear it read by someone who actually speaks a bit of Vietnamese!). But this is a great example of believable character growth -- take note, YA authors! Mai eventually does come to love Vietnam, which is certainly not unexpected, but she comes to the realization gradually. For most of the book, her main focus is on going home. She wants Ba to have closure not for Ba’s sake, but for her own selfish desires. It takes Mai a long time to finally realize that her grandmother is more important (and even then, she never really stops complaining about the heat and the bugs). It’s still great to see a teenager who grows and changes in a believable way, all while still acting like a teenager.

In short, buying this for my bookshelf, and hoping to track down copies for lit circles next year. This is a perfect book for 7th grade girls!

Read Harder Challenge #6 Completed: A book by a Southeast Asian author ...more

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Sep 01, 2017 Kristen rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2017, children-s, aoc, read-harder-2017

What a lovely, touching, sweet story. At first, Mai is upset that her summer break is ruined because she has to go with her granny and dad to Vietnam. They are going because there is some new information about her grandfather, who hadn't been able to escape Vietnam with her granny and their children, after the Vietnam War. Mai wants nothing to do with the trip, doesn't care about her heritage, and doesn't want to play caretaker to her granny. Over the weeks, almost against her will, she makes a ...more

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