It’s 1980, and 11-year-old Thọ Phạm lives with his family in South Vietnam. He spends his afternoons playing soccer and cricket fighting with his friends, but life is slowly changing under the Communists. Thọ knows the Communist army will soon knock on their door to make his brother, and then him, join them. Still, it shocks him when his father says that arrangements have been made for him to leave Vietnam by boat, immediately. Co-authors Thọ Phạm and Sandra McTavish, childhood friends, have loosely based this historical fiction novel on Thọ’s real-life experience as one of the Vietnamese Boat People, and includes many factual details from his journey on the South China Sea and in a Philippine refugee camp. Depictions of pirate attacks, hunger, and loneliness make for a riveting survival story, sure to elicit empathy for refugees.