Book Selections for 2025

A Hmong author explores her mother’s tumultuous life.

In this follow-up to The Latehomecomer and The Song Poet, Yang chronicles the life of her mother, Tswb, who was born to Laotian Hmong parents in the shadow of a war. Before her birth, the U.S. Army recruited Hmong men to fight in the alleged war against communism. When the Americans left, the local Lao government began to persecute Hmong families for their support of enemy troops, forcing many Hmong—including Tswb’s family—to adopt a nomadic life in the jungle, hiding from violent governmental retribution. After years of separation from her home village, Tswb, 16, met and married a handsome man named Npis, after leaving her family in the middle of a chaotic evacuation of their jungle camp. A few days later, she saw her mother and family for one of the last times in her life. Tswb fled with Npis’ family to Thailand and the U.S., while her mother would live in Laos until her burial in Tswb’s brother’s backyard. The lack of family unity is something Tswb mourned for the rest of her life: “It had been twenty-four years since my mother had died…. This was the impasse of my life. To be with my mother. To be away from my husband and my children. Why couldn’t we all be together?” At its best, the book is compassionate, lyrical, tender, and insightful. Unfortunately, the narratorial voice often feels alienated and overwritten, a contrast that the stunningly intimate prologue—which the author wrote from her own perspective—renders particularly stark. Nonetheless, Yang offers an engaging story of escape, redemption, and heartbreak; as in her previous books about Hmong culture, she also effectively highlights an ethnic group that’s rarely represented in American literature.

An occasionally uneven yet spirited and gripping memoir of the enduring bonds of family. (Kirkus Review)

In Yang’s middle-grade debut, a Hmong American boy makes sense of his place in the world.

In Part 1, readers meet Malcolm, who, through chapters written from the perspectives of his immediate family and elementary school teachers, grows from a kindergartener to a fifth grader. The youngest child of an older, working-class couple who came to Minnesota as refugees, Malcolm lives with his oldest sister, True, and her husband during the week so he can attend a private school; on weekends, he returns to his parents’ prairie home. Although this arrangement was a decision made with love, his family grapples with regrets and hopes. Meanwhile, many of his white teachers treat him differently due to their own biases. 

In Part 2, 11-year-old Malcolm takes over the narrative, revealing an introspective, sensitive, and lost young person. Malcolm collects family stories in order to “travel from the life I was living” and to connect with his family history. All four of his grandparents were shamans, and the shamans’ spirits are calling to Malcolm. After embarking on a spiritual journey, he finds himself literally immersed in the stories from his family’s history—stories from before he was alive, stories that aren’t without trauma. Lyrical, evocative prose deftly captures Malcolm’s longing for a sense of belonging; Yang has crafted a layered, profoundly moving musing on grief, connection (and lack thereof), and identity.

A true gem. Fiction. 11-14 (Kirkus Review)

A young Hmong American girl shares the small things of wonder that make up her world.

When Paj Ntaub moves into a new green house with big windows with her family, the garden grows with “tomatoes, green beans, and a watermelon as round as my mother’s belly.” Soon, the green house becomes their house. Paj Ntaub helps “Tais Tais hang the special story cloth about how the Hmong got to America.” She exchanges waves with her neighbors Bob and Ruth, an elderly white couple even older than Tais Tais. And changing seasons usher in life and death. In gentle prose, Yang’s picture-book debut explores nature, community, and connection. Twin brothers are born amid the summer bounty in the garden. On a snowy, cold morning, loss arrives, and bare gingko trees “[reach] for the sky with their thin fingers” against the new emptiness of the house across the street. When the world becomes green again, Paj Ntaub draws together these connections in a neighborly gesture of comfort. Using digital graphite, pastels, watercolor, and scanned handmade textures, Kim brings detailed dimension to the green house and the world around it. Alternating perspectives capture the expansiveness of the outside as well as the intimacy of Paj Ntaub’s observations.

Contemplative, curious, and kind. Picture book. 5-9. (Kirkus Review)