I personally love our main duo in this book. Butterfly Yellow has a powerful emotional impact that you might not anticipate at first, but it makes me tear up all the same. Along the way, she encounters LeeRoy, an aspiring cowboy who grudgingly drives her to the Texas town where her brother has been residing.įrankly speaking, I pretty much expected this book to bore me, but it was such a surprise when you just come to enjoy a book more than you expected to. To stay updated about Thanhhà's writing, visit and follow her on social media:īutterfly Yellow is a heartbreaking tale of perseverance, love, and survival - set in the 1981s, in the final days of the Vietnam War where Hằng is on her quest in finding her missing brother who was taken to America at the age of five as part of Operation Babylift. Thanhhà lives with her husband, daughter and a little white dog just north of New York City.

When Clouds Touch Us is out May 9th, 2023. Her latest book is When Clouds Touch Us, the long-awaited sequel to Inside Out & Back Again. Her debut picture book is Hundred Years of Happiness, illustrated by Phung Nguyen Quang and Huynh Kim Lien.

Next was Listen, Slowly, another middle grade novel featuring a young Vietnamese-American girl. Then came Inside Out & Back Again, a National Book Award and Newbery Honor-winning verse novel based in part on her childhood as a refugee in Alabama. She switched to fiction, leading to an MFA from New York University and short story publications in various journals and anthologies. Starting her writing life as a journalist, she worked at The Orange County Register.

There, she learned English from fourth graders and then spent the next decade correcting her grammar. At the end of the war, she fled with her family to Alabama.

Butterfly Yellow by Thanhhà Lại