Listen, Slowly, Thanhha Lai
Realistic fiction
Mai loves summer vacation. She lives in Orange County, California, so summer means surfing, swimming, and hanging out with her friends on the beach.
Except this summer, when it means going to Vietnam with her grandmother. For six weeks. Her dad’s going too, but he’s a doctor who spends his summers providing medical care for poor kids in remote mountain villages. Not like he brags about it or anything.
Anyway, Mai is supposed to spend these six weeks helping her grandmother find out what happened to Mai’s grandfather during the Vietnam War. What that actually looks like is hanging out with about a million cousins (some of them speak English, most of them don’t, and Mai only kind of speaks Vietnamese), getting bitten by a million mosquitoes, and sending a million texts to her friends back home.
It also means exploring new cities, making new friends, eating some seriously amazing food, and discovering all kinds of new things about her family and herself.
Listen, Slowly is sweet, honest, and extremely funny – a perfect read for anyone with a crazy family. (That’s all of us, right?)