Writers of Color 50 Books Challenge

An exquisitely beautiful graphic memoir by a Vietnamese woman who came to the USA as a child refugee. Bui weaves together the present-day birth of her son with the reckoning with her family of origin that childbirth so often provokes. Her parents' stories are told with imaginative insight, and the class barriers that divided them are sensitively drawn.



In black ink with a blood-red color wash, the art is gorgeous and many-layered. The map of Vietnam appears and reappears, and its sinuous curves are echoed by smoke, clouds, and ocean waves as Bui's family flees the aftermath of the war. Family and news photographs are incorporated and contextualized. The effect is to complicate and give a human face to a war we know both too much and too little about.