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

Bà has trained her to believe in ginger the way others rely on pills, curing everything from nausea to anxiety, stomach cramps to head throbs. Better than pills: Bà reasoned that ginger is always within reach—in a porch pot or at the open market. Hằng realizes Bà could not imagine a world without fresh ginger. But then lately, there have been so many unknowns that even Bà, the most practical, focused, even-hearted planner she knows, could not have predicted.

Even though Bà was too sick to escape by boat with Hằng and Mother, she foresaw thirst, so she packed lemons and plastic bottles of boiled water; foresaw hunger, so she sun-dried slivers of steamed sweet potatoes; foresaw danger, so she sewed disguises.

But Bà's imagination extended only to horrors known in her lifetime.

As soon as Hằng greeted her uncle at the airport yesterday, she told him Bà had insisted they go and reclaim Linh immediately. At the mention of Bà, her uncle's eyes swelled red. So Hằng understood in the five months since she left home, her grandmother had died from the tumor in her leg. As instructed, their neighbor must have sent word to her uncle.

Hằng wondered if she should have felt something intense; after all, Bà was truly gone. But all indulgent emotions have long remained on pause. She has yet to mourn her father or mother. Not until she finds her brother. She stared at her uncle and repeated Bà's wish.

Her uncle replied, "Listen to me, the child missing, you stay." He sounded awkward in a language long unused, his pronunciation clashing like spilled pots and lids.

As soon as he received Bà's letter right after the war ended, her uncle said he went to the address and found nothing but a ghost town. He waited all day, knocking on the few houses that still had doors. No one answered. He returned twice more before advertising in the local newspaper, then even hired a detective. But the boy had vanished. Now, with Hằng here, he reasoned they could approach new options, in time.

"I promise we will try new ways to find the boy," her uncle said. "First, you come home."

"I must see for myself," she insisted.

En-Di's father, whom Hằng addresses as Chú Quốc, grew red-faced and gushed a monsoon of reasons why Hằng could not go off on her own. Her lack of English, her inability to read the land and its people, and most importantly, her brother is not at the address. Her uncle clenched his fists. "NO, no, Bà not want wandering on your own," he stated as if it were true.

Hằng did not explain that Bà had warned she might need to go around him.

Chú Quốc alternated between pleading and threatening. Hằng presented a blank expression while mental currents began zapping. It was so easy to plot against a plump, heart-exposed uncle who blinked melty eyes at Hằng and assumed she needed protecting. But he should have guessed that the girl who had been taught to maneuver past the Communists would be able to slip away from her uncle. Now that she was just a bus ride from her Linh, no one would keep her from the final step.

The car speeds on, more red than maroon. Relieved, Hằng looks to the right where a machine is dipping its long neck into the earth. It straightens as if looking for predators then bends back down, again and again. A parched giraffe made of metal.

What the machine does she can't begin to guess, but she can watch it drink all day. Then, despite a ready mash of ginger, the pacified eels jolt awake, resurging the breakfast egg. She snaps her head back to a steady stare. Keeps still, barely breathes. Too late. Sickness grabs her.

The bus driver continues to hum and chew, vibrating the mass of fat at his nape. Crunchy something, chocolate slabs, gooey round pastries with a hole in the center. He sucks sticky fingers.

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.