Butterfly Yellow

I did not warm up to this right away, but when I finished it and went to give it a rating I found that it left more of an impression on me than I thought. The setting and situation didn't initially excite me (Vietnamese refugees in Texas), and I probably wouldn't have picked it up without the prompting of a mock Printz discussion. I'm glad I did. While some of the writing I found distracting and choppy, other parts were sheer poetry. Hang's phonetic English was tough for me to read on the page, but at some point it got much easier (and I didn't even notice!) It gave me the feeling that I was understanding her better, just as LeeRoy was. Frustrated by the motivations and choices of both Hang and LeeRoy in the beginning, I felt deeply for them by the end. I felt like Lai gives the reader a decent amount of blank space to fill in for themselves. I'm going with 4 instead of 5 stars because I felt like there were some gaps in the narrative, and the slow burn of this book was maybe a little too slow. I would love to get an actual young adult's opinion on this one. I can't imagine teen-me enjoying it, but adult-me definitely did.