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🧲 Books like this

Inside Out & Back Again

Thanhha Lai · back to the book

What’s in it

Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.

24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
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Everything Sad Is Untrue

Daniel Nayeri · 356 pages

Refugee ExperienceChild NarratorImmigrant ProtagonistMiddle Grade
❤️

The Good Braider

Terry Farish · 224 pages

Follows Viola as she survives brutality in war-torn Sudan, makes a perilous journey, lives as a refugee in Egypt, and finally reaches Portland, Maine, where her quest for freedom and security is hampered by memories of past horrors and the traditions her mother and other Sudanese adults hold dear. Includes historical facts and a timeline of Sudan.

Verse NovelRefugee ExperienceImmigrant ProtagonistEmotional
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The Sympathizer

Viet Thanh Nguyen · 384 pages

Follows a Viet Cong agent as he spies on a South Vietnamese army general and his compatriots as they start a new life in 1975 Los Angeles.

Vietnam WarImmigrant ProtagonistRefugee ExperienceEmotional
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In the Sea There are Crocodiles: Based on the True Story of Enaiatollah Akbari

Fabio Geda · 215 pages

An unflinching, inspirational, and incredibly moving novel based on the true story of Enaiatollah Akbari, a young boy whose agonizing struggle begins after his native Afghanistan becomes a dangerous place to live. His mother shepherds him across the border into Pakistan but has to leave him there to fend for himself.

Refugee ExperienceChild NarratorImmigrant ProtagonistEmotional
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The Bone Sparrow

Zana Fraillon · 256 pages

Subhi is a refugee. Born in an Australian permanent detention center after his mother and sister fled the violence of a distant homeland, Subhi has only ever known life behind the fences. But his world is far bigger than that-every night, the magical Night Sea from his mother's stories brings him gifts, the faraway whales sing to him, and the birds tell their stories.

Refugee ExperienceChild NarratorMiddle GradeEmotional
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Brown Girl Dreaming

Jacqueline Woodson · 368 pages

Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement.

Verse NovelChild NarratorMiddle GradeFirst Person Narrator
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We Need New Names

NoViolet Bulawayo · 304 pages

Whenever foreigners visit Paradise they always ask Darling and her friends to smile for the camera. Here are some of the things Darling and her friends have to smile about: stealing guavas, gifts from NGOs, singing Lady Gaga at the tops of their voices. But they all want to go to the real paradise in America or Britain.

Child NarratorRefugee ExperienceImmigrant ProtagonistEmotional
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Nowhere Boy

Katherine Marsh · 366 pages

Refugee ExperienceImmigrant ProtagonistMiddle GradeEmotional
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Home of the Brave

Katherine Applegate · 256 pages

Kek, an African refugee, is confronted by many strange things at the Minneapolis home of his aunt and cousin, as well as in his fifth grade classroom, and longs for his missing mother, but finds comfort in the company of a cow and her owner.

Verse NovelRefugee ExperienceImmigrant ProtagonistMiddle Grade
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Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood

Marjane Satrapi · 160 pages

Wise, funny, and heartbreaking, Persepolis is Marjane Satrapi’s memoir of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. In powerful black-and-white comic strip images, Satrapi tells the story of her life in Tehran from ages six to fourteen, years that saw the overthrow of the Shah’s regime, the triumph of the Islamic Revolution, and the devastating effects of war with Iraq. The intelligent and

Child NarratorRefugee ExperienceEmotionalFirst Person Narrator
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The Unforgotten Coat

Frank Cottrell Boyce

Refugee ExperienceChild NarratorImmigrant ProtagonistMiddle Grade
❤️

The Best We Could Do

Thi Bui · 335 pages

The author describes her experiences as a young Vietnamese immigrant, highlighting her family's move from their war-torn home to the United States in graphic novel format.

Vietnam WarRefugee ExperienceEmotionalWar Trauma
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What Is the What

Dave Eggers · 475 pages

*What Is the What* is the epic novel based on the life of Valentino Achak Deng who, along with thousands of other children--the so-called Lost Boys--was forced to leave his village in Sudan at the age of seven and trek hundreds of miles by foot, pursued by militias, government bombers, and wild animals, crossing the deserts of three countries to find freedom. When he finally is resettled in the Un

Refugee ExperienceImmigrant ProtagonistFirst Person NarratorEmotional
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Child NarratorImmigrant ProtagonistMiddle GradeEmotional
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Yellow Star

Jennifer Roy · 227 pages

From 1939, when Syvia is four and a half years old, to 1945 when she has just turned ten, a Jewish girl and her family struggle to survive in Poland's Lodz ghetto during the Nazi occupation.

Verse NovelChild NarratorMiddle GradeEmotional
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How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone

Sasa Stanisic · 288 pages

Aleksandar is Comrade-in-Chief of fishing, the best magician in the non-aligned States and painter of unfinished things. He knows the first chapter of Marx's Das Kapital by heart but spends most of his time playing football in the Bosnian town of Visegrad on the banks of the river Drina. When his grandfather, a master storyteller, dies of the fastest heart attack in the world while watching Carl L

Child NarratorRefugee ExperienceImmigrant ProtagonistFirst Person Narrator
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The Red Umbrella

Christina Diaz Gonzalez · 284 pages

The Red Umbrella is the moving tale of a 14-year-old girl's journey from Cuba to America as part of Operation Pedro Pan--an organized exodus of more than 14,000 unaccompanied children, whose parents sent them away to escape Fidel Castro's revolution.In 1961, two years after the Communist revolution, Lucia Alvarez still leads a carefree life, dreaming of parties and her first crush. But when the so

Refugee ExperienceImmigrant ProtagonistMiddle GradeEmotional
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Witness

Karen Hesse · 161 pages

A series of poems express the views of various people in a small Vermont town, including a young black girl and a young Jewish girl, during the early 1920s when the Ku Klux Klan is trying to infiltrate the town.

Verse NovelChild NarratorMiddle GradeEmotional
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The Girl in the Picture: The Story of Kim Phuc, the Photograph, and the Vietnam War

Denise Chong · 373 pages

On June 8, 1972, nine-year-old Kim Phuc, severely burned by napalm, ran from her blazing village in South Vietnam and into the eye of history. Her photograph-one of the most unforgettable images of the twentieth century-was seen around the world and helped turn public opinion against the Vietnam War.This book is the story of how that photograph came to be-and the story of what happened to that gir

Vietnam WarRefugee ExperienceImmigrant ProtagonistEmotional
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The Kite Runner

Khaled Hosseini · 368 pages

The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father’s servant, The Kite Runner is a beautifully crafted novel set in a country that is in the process of being destroyed. It is about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption; and an exploration of the power of fathers over sons—their love, their sacri

Refugee ExperienceImmigrant ProtagonistFirst Person NarratorEmotional
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Ru

Kim Thuy · 141 pages

A runaway bestseller in Quebec, with foreign rights sold to 15 countries around the world, Kim Thuy's Governor General's Literary Award-winning RU is a lullaby for Vietnam and a love letter to a new homeland. In vignettes of exquisite clarity, sharp observation and sly wit, we are carried along on an unforgettable journey from a palatial residence in Saigon to a crowded and muddy Malaysian refugee

Refugee ExperienceVietnam WarImmigrant ProtagonistFirst Person Narrator
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Red Butterfly

A.L. Sonnichsen · 400 pages

A young orphaned girl in modern-day China discovers the meaning of family in this inspiring story told in verse, in the tradition of Inside Out and Back Again and Sold. Kara never met her birth mother. Abandoned as an infant, she was taken in by an American woman living in China. Now eleven, Kara spends most of her time in their apartment, wondering why she and Mama cannot leave the city of Tianji

Verse NovelChild NarratorMiddle GradeEmotional
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The Red Pencil

Andrea Davis Pinkney · 338 pages

"After her tribal village is attacked by militants, Amira, a young Sudanese girl, must flee to safety at a refugee camp, where she finds hope and the chance to pursue an education in the form of a single red pencil and the friendship and encouragement of a wise elder"-- After her village is attacked by militants, Amira, a young Sudanese girl, must flee to a refugee camp, where she finds hope and

Verse NovelRefugee ExperienceMiddle GradeUplifting
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Refugee ExperienceChild NarratorMiddle GradeEmotional
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