"We're home," Andy's father says as the plane touches down at the Hanoi airport, but it isn't home to Andy. Although his father was one of the "boat people" who made a dangerous escape from Vietnam, Andy lives in Australia, where his father settled. In this multicultural middle school book, he's about to visit relatives he's never met.

Culture shock sets in quickly: risking death to cross the street through insane traffic; vendors cooking on small charcoal fires on the sidewalk; street kids selling postcards for $5.00 apiece, loudspeakers broadcasting the news to the neighborhood before dawn. In addition, Andy has questions. Why is his father wearing a gold watch and diamond ring that Andy's never seen before? And why was he told that the family owned a fancy restaurant when it's just a hole in the wall? When Andy and his father hand out the gifts they brought, their relatives squabble and grab, even though most gifts are no more than shampoo or toothpaste. Andy feels they're selfish and unappreciative.

It takes a while to learn who all of his relatives are, but he quickly notices that his thirteen-year-old cousin Minh is at the bottom of the food chain. She's basically an unpaid servant, working hard in the restaurant for no pay. Later on, while she's supposed to be at school, he sees her out in the streets, part of a group of street kids selling postcards and souvenirs to the tourists. He talks to her and she tells him why she does it.

The family restaurant may be barely the size of Andy's bedroom at home, but he quickly discovers that the food is delicious and that Minh is a talented cook. However, although the restaurant is busy with local customers, clearly it doesn't make much money. He and Minh come up with a plan to help it bring in more income. The results of their plan and its reverberations in the family make for a touching and satisfying ending.

Andy is a likable, spunky, and humorous tour guide for our vicarious trip to Hanoi. I admired the enterprising way he and Minh carry out their plan. Andy's father is a more complex and poignant character, happy to be back home, yet learning that "you can't go home again."

Author Ruth Starke includes some "extras" at the end: several easy recipes for Vietnamese dishes (yum!) and some info about Vietnamese street kids, including how we can help through an organization called KOTO.

Andy Nguyen and his father left their Australian home for several weeks to visit their relatives in Hanoi, Vietnam. Andy's father had fled Vietnam years ago, and Hanoi had changed a great deal since his departure. For Andy, who had never traveled to Vietnam before, all the traffic, pollution, noise, manners, and customs seemed so different from the way of life to which he had become accustomed.

Andy was especially taken aback by the scale of the family restaurant that his aunt and grandmother operated. In contrast to the glamorous Vietnamese restaurant he had imagined, they ran a hole-in-the-wall kind of establishment where locals sat in tiny plastic stools on the sidewalk, the cooks crowded together along the curb chopping and cooking, a strange woman sat under the stairs washing all the pots and dishes in plastic buckets, and there were no menus or sanitation practices to speak of. Andy realized that the restaurant's meager earnings helped to explain why his father wound up sending so much of his hard-earned money to Vietnam to help support his relations. Could Andy, the young newcomer, possibly stir things up a little?

Thoroughly woven into the plot are a series of valuable economics lessons related to the operations of family-owned businesses as well as remittances sent home by overseas family members. Although the writing style could have been more nuanced (much information is conveyed through questions and answers between father and son), the content has enough novelty to provide readers with an interesting snapshot of the rapidly developing city of Hanoi.

I really enjoyed Ruth Starke's new YA novel, Noodle Pie. I admit, the title sucked me in at once with the whole visual it created, but the storytelling and the father/son relationship with the Vietnam background was just absorbing.

I was a teen during the Vietnam War, and I saw the stark images of what was going on over there at the time every night on the television news. The images of the last helicopter taking off from Saigon were incredible, one of those that will live on in memory forever.

Starke's audience are going to lack the historical depth that I have while reading this book, but she builds in such an interesting family that younger readers without knowledge of the war are going to be drawn in by the emotional drama between those people.

Andy grew up in Australia and doesn't really have a clue about his father's birth country. He'd heard dozens of times about the nightmare boat ride that brought his father out of that country, so the story has lost some of its punch. However, his father starts acting weird while on the trip over to Vietnam. Dressed in new clothes, wearing a fancy gold watch and diamond ring that they could never afford, his dad starts acting like he's wealthy. Andy knows they're not.

I loved the mystery of Andy's dad, and what was really at the root of the change. The reader doesn't find out what's going on until the end of the book, and by then the story is really ready to be told most effectively.

Starke also seems to know her way around the Vietnamese streets. The life there, quick and vibrant and sometimes desperate, springs to life off the pages. I've got images in my head of the scooters and cyclos that won't leave me for a long time. And the whole cooking on the ground in front of an open-air restaurant just blows me away.

Some of the best aspects of the book are the relationships between the different family members and how Andy relates to them. I especially enjoyed the way he traveled through the city with his dad as his dad kept seeing all the changes that had taken place since he'd been gone.

Noodle Pie is an excellent novel for young readers because it explores themes that kids can understand (fear of strange places, alienation, not knowing where they fit in a big family) while at the same time offering the experience of a foreign country that's very different than what most of them know.

One of my favorite bits of the book, though, was the KOTO Restaurant. It's a real-life place. With the motto, Know One Teach One (which is where it gets the name), the restaurant has captured my interested. I'm going to look it up on the internet and send a donation along. I encourage readers of this review to do the same. And read the book. It's good.