Author: Marsha

Each year, the Ontario Library Association’s Canadian Materials Committee, which is under the umbrella of the OPLA Child and Youth Services Committee, picks an annual list of best books in Canada. Books are selected on the basis of their literary/artistic merit as well as their appeal for children.  Text and illustrations are of equal importance in picture books and information books.

Ten books for each category are picked from all that were published in Canada in the previous year. It is thrilling that Last Airlift was chosen as a top non-fiction of the year. It is the first time I’ve written narrative non-fiction so this gives me encouragement to write some more!

Here I am with Tuyết, Tuyet, and Thi Mai at the Last Airlift book launch in Toronto on November 15th — three of the girls who in 1975 were airlifted out of Saigon in the Last Airlift.

Lisa Dalrymple enjoying the launch.

Here I am with Mahtab Narsimhan and Tuyet.

Here’s me and Mahtab and Last Airlift!

CM gave Last Airlift 3.5/4 stars here.

Fans of Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch’s books will know her most recurring themes are the effects of war on children and her young protagonists’ struggles to find family and home in the wake of it. In her first nonfiction YA title, Skrypuch explores these areas of human ferocity and need once again, but this time readers experience the story through the eyes of Son Thi Anh Tuyet, the girl who actually lived it.

Rather than using the first-person point of view that is common to memoir, Skypuch has settled on a third-person narrative to tell Tuyet’s story. Here, the choice serves to echo some of the isolation and estrangement Tuyet feels, while the real and telling details obtained by the close collaboration between the author and the now-adult Tuyet pull the reader into the emotional upheaval the child Tuyet has to deal with every day.

It is 1975, and Tuyet is eight-years-old. She is housed in an orphanage in Saigon, South Vietnam. She can’t recall a time before she lived there. Inside the orphanage, she can hear helicopters and airplanes, and bombs going off. But she can’t see them because the children are not allowed to go outside, ever. Outside, the Vietnam War is going on.

Then, in April, Saigon falls to the Viet Cong, and Tuyet is thrust headlong into a journey she does not understand and of which she is even more afraid than she had been of the war and her life in the orphanage.

In the world the eight-year-old knows, only perfect children are adopted or kept alive. Tuyet is imperfect. Polio has ruined her left leg and foot. So, she has been vigilant to find ways to make herself useful enough that the nuns who run the orphanage have let her stay and have given her food. But now she is removed from the relative safety of the system she has so carefully worked out. She does not know where she’s going, or why, or what will happen when she gets there.

On each leg of the long and exhausting journey, there are new challenges and terrors Tuyet must overcome. Young readers will find themselves riding an emotional roller coaster with her as she is taken away by strangers who speak a language unintelligible to her and put aboard a van, and then an airplane filled with screaming babies. Readers will learn what she endures as she loses everything she knows, or attaches to, including the only two friends she has ever had. Nor does her ordeal end when the airplane touches down in a foreign land called Canada. But along the way, her courage and resourcefulness allow her, and her readers, to carry on.

Overall, the 24 black and white illustrations serve to increase readers’ understanding of Tuyet’s journey as she experienced it. The tanks (ill. 2 1) and the photos of the babies (ill. 3 1) and the children (ill. 4 1) inside the plane give readers a clear sense of urgency and exhausting nature of the airlift rescue scheme, while photos of Tuyet, including her arrival in Toronto (ill. 4 4), and the Morris family photo (ill. 6 2) clearly show the strain and sorrow suffered by the little girl and her clinging to the man she is still afraid might send her back to her war torn country. In the end, readers also clearly see a transformation taking place (ill. 10 1 with Linh and ill. 10 2).

Some of the illustrations caused a disruption in the flow of Tuyet’s story and might have been better placed in the endnotes. Examples are: the pilot (ill. 4 3), which shows a calm looking man readers have not gotten to know, and the care workers with other children (5 1), which lifts readers out of Tuyet’s story.

Documents, such as the birth certificate (1 1), and the adoption order (6 1), which, as it’s placed, gives away the future and reduces the tension the author is trying hard to maintain, might also be better in the endnotes.

The author’s endnotes serve to clarify another sticking point for this reader, which was that apparently neither the nuns at the orphanage nor any of the adults Tuyet met during the journey who spoke her language (and there were some) took time to sit down with the terrified girl and explain what was happening. But there is a credible explanation for that blank spot. The historical note brings readers up-to-date and lays the facts of why Tuyet’s journey was so necessary on the line.

Last Airlift is the story of an heroic deed, of one young girl’s courage and resourcefulness when she most needs it, and of the ending she could not foresee.

Highly Recommended.

Jocelyn Reekie is a writer, editor and publisher in Campbell River, BC.

1. Push forward, not back. Ie, don’t worry about grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, gaps in logic etc during that frantic first draft. Once it’s down on the page, don’t look back. Revision can come after you’ve written “the end”.

2. Write for at least an hour at a time during NaNoWriMo but do not write to the point of exhaustion on any given day. There is a sweet spot for the imagination and it comes between one and five hours. If you write more than that in a day, you’re likely writing gobbledegook. Find your sweet spot and don’t write beyond it.

3. When you stop writing for the day, stop in the middle of a paragraph. Stop in the middle of a sentence. Better yet, stop in the middle of a word that’s mid paragraph. This way, when you go back to your manuscript the next day, you’ll have no trouble picking up where you left off.

4. When you are drifting off to sleep at night, force yourself to think of the scene where you last left your characters and ask yourself what are the variations of what will happen next. Go through all of the events of your character’s day the way you’d normally be going through your own. By doing this, you can train yourself to dream-problem-solve the next chunk of your novel.

5. If you write yourself into a corner, try switching to another character’s point of view. Or just leave that scene behind and start something new on a totally different day and scenario for your character. Have your character do something mundance like the laundry or picking up a prescription from the drug store. Soon your head will fill back up with ideas and you’ll be clipping along again.