This novelist’s family fled Laos and she ended up in Arden Hills

V. T. Bidania describes her family as “pretty private” and “shy” but they better get used to attention because they’re the stars of her new book.

“I didn’t want to write about them,” said the Arden Hills-based writer of books for young people, including the autobiographical “A Year Without Home.”

“I like to read stories and memoirs but I never thought I’d write about my family. But it all kind of happened.”

Bidania is calling “A Year Without Home” a fictionalized memoir. Inspired by her family’s escape from Laos in the mid-1970s and eventual arrival in Minnesota, the novel changes some names and moves around many details. But it’s very similar to her family’s story, with big sister Gao Sheng as the main character (V.T., whose Lao name is Vong Deuane, was a toddler at the time).

And there’s another twist: The entire book is written in free (un-rhymed) verse.

“I was reading a whole bunch of middle-grade verse novels a few years back, when they started to become all the rage. I just fell in love with them,” said Bidania, who mostly reads books written for youngsters. “A lot were immigrant stories but not all of them. Really, what got me was they were so beautifully written, not just the lyrical writing and imagery but what got to me was the white space.”

Bidania, who is raising two sons with husband Win, was fascinated by the possibilities of the empty parts of pages that surround poems, space that can speed up or slow down the story or emphasize important parts. In a way, putting fewer words on a page is similar to how movie close-ups signal us to pay especially close attention.

Hopefully, there’s extra power in that technique because “A Year Without Home” uses it sparingly. Bidania would have liked to have used more white spacey pages, including in a section when her family learns her dad is on a list of Hmong people the Communists are hunting for, but she was overruled.

“On one page, I wanted to put just dad’s name. We were so shocked that they were looking for him. But my editor said no. We had to cut a lot, actually, because the way it’s formatted, like poems, it ends up being a lot more pages,” said Bidania.

She likes paragraphs, too, but Bidania, whose other books include “Astrid and Apollo and the Sticky Noodle Situation,” was struck by the power of just a few words on a page. Verse came surprisingly naturally to her, even though she had not written poetry or even studied it, partly because all those books-in-verse that she read amounted to a self-taught poetry course.

“The novels were so beautiful and powerful that I felt inspired: Maybe I’m going to try to write one, too,” said Bidania, who has a degree in journalism from St. Catherine University in St. Paul and a master of fine arts in children’s literature from Manhattan’s New School. “Then, I thought, ‘Why not write about my family’s escape and our time in the refugee camps?’ If I wanted something to affect readers the way these books affected me, that seemed like a good thing to write about.”

Bidania interviewed family members, including sister Gao Sheng, who really did make rice cakes with their mom and sell them to other residents in the Thai refugee camp where they lived, and brother Yia, who was sent to the United States as a child, months before the rest of the family made the trip.

“I wanted to show about our hardships and suffering and about the time in the camp, but I also wanted to show the joys and the love we had for our homes and for Laos. Sorry, I get really emotional talking about this,“ said Bidania, pausing briefly. ”It is a refugee story but, more than that, I want the book to be a human story."

The jury’s still out on how her family will react. Her brother said he was fine with whatever, since the book is labeled as fiction, but Bidania said it was tricky to capture the character based on her mother: “She’s fine now that she’s older but at the time, she was scary. But I didn’t want to make her look like the stereotypical Asian tiger mom, either. I did want to show that she was strict and that it was hard for my sister but I didn’t want her to seem evil or abusive.”

She’s not sure her mother will read the book, so she may never know what mom thinks. She definitely won’t be able to learn her dad’s reaction, although Bidania hopes he’d have been proud.

“Halfway through working on the book, my dad passed away. I really missed him. It tilted my world on its axis,” Bidania said. “But, eventually, I thought, ‘I’ll get back into it, finish it and send it to my agent.’ That really helped with the grieving process. If I had not had this book to focus on, I don’t know what I would have done.”

A Year Without Home

Publisher: Penguin Kids, 416 pages.