Two of Carolyn Marsden’s books for middle grade readers were published this year and nominated for the Cybil Award for Middle Grade Fiction: Bird Springs (Semicolon mini-review here) and When Heaven Fell. I liked the latter book much better than I liked Bird Springs.

When Heaven Fell is the story of nine year old Binh who lives in post-war Vietnam and sells fruit and sodas to the schoolgirls on their way to school, a school she can’t afford because her family doesn’t always have enough money for food, much less for school uniforms and books. When the family finds out that Ba Ngoai, Binh’s grandmother, had a daughter during the war, a daughter who was sent away to America to be adopted because she was half-American, and that that grown-up daughter is coming to visit her mother, Ba Ngoai, everyone in the family is excited and expecting Auntie Di Hai to bring rich presents. Maybe she’ll even take them all to America, since all Americans are rich and since Di Hai has a house big enough for the entire extended family.

The story is told from Binh’s point of view, which makes the contrast in cultural expectations and in wealth even more stark and a bit painful. The book doesn’t go for the guilt trip, however, attempting to make Americans, and indeed Westerners in general, feel guilty for their great wealth in comparison to the rest of the world. Instead, I felt Di Hai/Sharon Hughes’ quandary as she tries to understand what it is these people, her family that she doesn’t really know or remember, expect from her and what she can give. I would pair this book with Mitali Perkins’ Rickshaw Girl to start a discussion of how to help people in poverty, what our responsibilities are as “rich” people, and what family obligations and charity involve. Also, for a discussion of cross-cultural adoption, you could read this book with Kimchi and Calamari by Rose Kent, another Cybils nominee about another adopted child, this time from Korea, who tries to find his natural mother and understand his cultural heritage.