Kate Gadbow

"In an essay written for his ESL class, a young student describes his flight from Vietnam at the age of twelve, in a fishing boat with three friends. They were beaten by Thai pirates, fell faint with hunger and pain, until they were "pushed to the kind shore by a finger of God." The phrase evokes an overriding metaphor for this first novel by Kate Gadbow, in which a community of Vietnamese and Hmong refugees struggles to maintain balance between the...