THE REFUGEES by Viet Thanh Nguyen

THE REFUGEES by Viet Thanh Nguyen is an extremely well-written collection of emotional stories which received starred reviews from Booklist, Kirkus, Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly.  Although somewhat sophisticated for many of our high school readers, THE REFUGEES does explore themes of assimilation, family, identity, and loneliness.  Viet Thanh Nguyen provides selections such as “Black-Eyed Women” which is a ghost story about losing a brother during the family’s horrifying boat escape or “The Other Man” in which a gay couple invites a Vietnamese refugee into their home and he struggles with language and cultural differences.   

As I prepared the review for this book, I was surprised to see the number of recently published books about refugees, particularly those intended for younger students.  If you are searching for lesson plans about refugees, consider this one for high schoolers which also deals with media bias and was made available last week by the Choices Program at Brown University.   

Viet Thanh Nguyen received numerous awards, including the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, for The Sympathizer which some of our students have used as a main text for Junior Theme.  Enjoy THE REFUGEES, since as Nguyen says, “Stories are just things we fabricate, nothing more.  We search for them in a word besides our own, then leave them here to be found, garments shed by ghosts.”