Excerpt from Butterfly Yellow by Thanhha Lai, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

He listens hard and gets the next two lines.

The lyrics make him happy, and when he's happy he likes sweets. His parents sent him off with a pint of milk and a pan of brownies, cut into nine squares. He's gotten into five.

The sixth piece calls for cold milk.

The Panhandle

Texas is shaped like a huge iron skillet. By elementary school, every child has learned that its protruding northwestern tip is called the Panhandle. Yet Hằng has never heard of the pan, much less its handle.

She does know about Texas, had long been told that her father's younger brother is a doctor in Dallas. Two S-shaped Vietnams can snuggle inside Texas's skillet, yet the small country has four times the state's population. No wonder Hằng has ridden for hours and stared into nothing but white-blue sky, a forever brown, and an assault of billboards: on one Repent or Live Forever After in Damnation, on another three cowboys tame a horse under the headline ACME THE REAL WEST, then a close-up of a sizzling steak.

Hằng wonders who would eat a bleeding slab of meat the size of a thigh? And why are Clint Eastwood and his cool cold stare not on any of the billboards?

Back home she thought cowboys would roam this world, kicking up clouds of dust as they sped by on horses. When she tried to escape with her brother near the end of the war, she planned on coming here, learning to tame wild mustangs and surprising their father.

It shocks her that six years ago she was that naive and silly. For years she and her brother watched cowboy movies with their father. Those humid evenings sunken into tick-ticks from the projector, as film reels looped and looped. They were entranced to have Clint Eastwood flicker on the living room wall, his tough-man mumbles squeezing through lips opened to a sliver. From the cowboy's hisses their father taught her English while her little brother practiced hissing.

Her father never said, but Hằng knew, if Việt Nam had cowboys he would have given up his translation job and put on working boots. He could talk just like them. And manage the heat. In every scene cowboys hid from the sun in wide hats, blanket coats, tough pants, and suffocating boots, all the while tugging at sweat-stained handkerchiefs protecting their throats. The men couldn't have smelled too good. Soaked underneath, sun-cracked on the surface.

Hằng is on her way to the one address she knows in this land: 405 Mesquite Street, Amarillo, Texas.

In the final days of the war in April 1975, Hằng thought she was so clever, devising a way to flee while her family strategized and worried. Every day newspapers printed stories about Americans panicking to save hundreds of orphans. There was even an official name, Operation Babylift. She assumed she and her brother would go first, then somehow her family would join them in America. But in line at the airport she was rejected, a twelve-year-old passing as eight. Linh was five, three to foreign eyes, just young enough to be accepted as an orphan. Hằng saw little Linh thrashing as he was carried into a Pan Am.

By the time her brother was ripped from her, nobody cared to hear why she lied. With so many scrambling to flee before the victorious Communists marched in, one more screaming child was just that. An American volunteer with puffy, sweaty hands must have felt sorry for her. He pressed a card into her palm as he pushed her away from the ladder. Sun rays radiated through each strand of his mango-colored hair. She had to stop an impulse to extinguish the fiery puff of gold threads on his head. He was the last to board. Hằng screamed until the Pan Am blended into the sky and left a long loose-curl cloud. For hours, until dusk enveloped her and mosquitoes chased her home, she focused skyward and pleaded for forgiveness. When she opened her palm, the card had disintegrated except for one clue: 405 Mesquite Street, Amarillo, Texas.

Excerpted from Butterfly Yellow by Thanhha Lai. Copyright © 2019 by Thanhha Lai. Excerpted by permission of HarperCollins Children's Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.