Kalia's father helps her to gain perspective of their refugee camp in Thailand. The wording in this book is simple and not preachy. It really made me think about and appreciate the life that I have; but this book is not preachy, just simply beautifully realistic.

The illustrations in this book are superb. Beautiful, creative, uniquely different.

Thank you to NetGalley, the publisher (Lerner Publishing Group), the author Kao Kalia Yang and the illustrator Rachel Wada. Publication date is 05 Oct 2021. Very well done. I would buy this book for my niece and nephew.

Yang has depicted a sorrowful and realistic picture of her own biographical experience as a refugee in Thailand. Beautifully illustrated by Rachel Wada, the hopeful outlook on life and where the world can take us is depicted under the harsh reality of a 1985 refugee camp in Thailand.

From the gorgeous cover and the dedication page, you can already tell this is going to be a special book.

We are welcomed into the memories of a young girl named Kalia, whose family is living in a refugee camp for Hmong people in Thailand. Their situation is unpleasant, but not horrible, at least through this child's eyes. They are surviving, together.

One day Kalia asks what's beyond the fences of their compound, and in response, her father indulges her with a climb up the highest tree in the camp to show her what lies beyond. It's a beautiful gesture, and her mother captures the moment with a borrowed camera.

And this is where the tears started, at least for me. The next page is no longer the beautiful watercolor illustrations we've been seeing, but the ACTUAL PHOTO taken by her mother back in 1985. The reality of Kalia's childhood hit me like a bucket of cold water. It was both sweet and sorrowful, hopeful and painful.

Do your conscience a favor, and step into Kalia's childhood shoes for a little while. Read this book, and understand just how thankful you should be for your imperfect, but relatively safe, life. Then let her message inspire you to do more and be more for those escaping war.

This book was so cute! It was a different perspective for me for sure, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. Kalia's perspective as a young child living in a refuge camp, for me, was the strongest part of the book. I loved her voice, and the writing was also beautiful as we see things from the perspective of a child. It isn't a serious book about the life of people in refuge camps, instead it is a tale of hope and love and joy and dreams.

This book is in one word stunning . The story is so wholesome and heart warming , We follow a little girl Kalia who has lived in a refugee camp in Thailand since she can remember . The people of Thailand were keeping the members of the Hmong tribe captive . Kalia is full of joy and hope and she asks her father if all the world was a refugee camp , to this he takes her to the trees and shows her the wide expanse of the beautiful world that awaited her beyond the refugee camp . I can only imagine what a exciting view it might have been for little Kalia from the top of the trees .
The illustrations of this book were beyond amazing , each page was so detailed and well thought of , the colour sceme was also on point . Highly highly reconmend it .

This is a beautiful picture book about Kalia and other Hmong refugees living in a refugee camp in Thailand. How the little kids entertain themselves playing with the dogs and picking fruits.
How they hear the adults talk about war and have to stand in line to receive ration food.
But mostly this book is the discovery of a new world and hope.
One day Kalia's father climbs a tree with Kalia on his shoulders to show her what's beyond.
For Kalia this is the discovery of "another" world outside the camp and how vast and beautiful it can be.

The art style of this book is perfection itself and I feel it complements the story of the book 100%.

I reviewed a copy made available by the publisher via Netgalley - Thank you very much for that!

First of all, I would like to appreciate the wonderful illustrations, they are so soft and beautifully colored.

„From the Top of the Trees“ gives us a child-friendly insight into everyday life in a refugee-camp from the perspective of little Kalia, a little Hmong girl who lives in the Ban Vinai Refugee Camp with her family.
It‘s about her trying to find her place in this world.

This book is written in a beautiful poetic language, some of the quotes are very touching.
The text passages are not too long - I‘m sure children will understand it.

An autobiographical early reader from a lady of Hmong descent, showing us how her father instilled in her a wish to go far – by taking her to the treetops and showing her there is more to life than just the refugee camp they were forced to call home at the time. Height was important to him, clearly – he tells his daughter that if someone falls down you respond by raising them to higher than they had been. And this should have no small heights of success – it's a lot more subtle than I feared, and gains both from being our author's own reminiscence and from being quite a universal situation. There's little wrong with the illustrations, either.

Wow! What a profound little book! Both my children and I really enjoyed it. The artwork is beautiful and the prose is a small memoir of the author's from when they were a child, in a refuge camp in Thailand. I enjoyed learning about a history that I was not aware of and thankful to the author for sharing her own personal experiences to help us all be a little more conscious of what was going in then, beyond the Vietnam War.

This fantastic read would be an excellent addition to a children's history unit study with it's mesmerizing illustrations and simple, yet impactful, composition.

Wow! This was a good, short read that was perfect to teach kids about the different refugee camps. It was heartbreaking that the little girl didn’t know life outside of the camp. The illustrations were good, and the story was easy to read.