Turn on the lights and get in close because you don’t want to miss a brush stroke or stitch. The Whispering Cloth: a refugee story, captures the life and story of a young Hmong girl named Mai who escaped Laos during the war with her grandmother and fled to neighboring Thailand where she lived her life as a refugee. Author Pegi Deitz Shea, Illustrator Anita Riggio, and Stitcher You Yang have put together a magnificent work of art that is just one of the many stories to be heard, yet this single piece gives great insight to the lives of refugees and the different ways people tell and remember their stories. Pegi Deitz Shea traveled to a refugee camp in Thailand, and that experience inspired this book.

~C.W. Elementary Teacher