Phan’s family saga has many riches, but it lacks the clear focus to become a standout debut.
In this multigenerational novel of the Vietnamese diasporas, a family is split between France and America, thanks to the secrets of their patriarch.
The novel opens in contemporary Vietnam, where Cherry Truong is visiting her wayward brother Lum. Cherry is trying to convince him to return home to Los Angeles (where he was a disappointment to the expectations of their parents), but Vietnam has transformed him—now Lum has a prosperous future in real-estate development and a girlfriend with a baby on the way. The irony of his Vietnamese success brings the novel back to the Truong family’s escape in the ’70s. Hung and Hoa Truong pay passage for their family (two sons, three daughters-in-law and a couple of grandchildren) for the dangerous boat ride to a refugee camp in Malaysia. After years of waiting, they finally find sponsorship from a wealthy French family and join their eldest son Yen, now a lawyer, in Paris. All but youngest son Sanh, who with his wife immigrates to America. The family’s split branches—Cherry and Lum grow up in Southern California and their cousins in Paris—offer a peak into the ubiquitous nature of the immigrant experience, however Phan’s telling of the two stories becomes a patchwork of ideas. Much of the novel involves the downtrodden Hoa (her husband Hung is a tyrant) and follows her from the camps to their new life in Paris, a cold world where they must remain in perpetual gratitude to the haughty Bourdains. In California Cherry and Lum play outside their mother’s beauty salon, while Grandmother Vo becomes the neighborhood moneylender. Interspersed are letters, from Hung to his mistress (the secret source of all the family’s problems) or from Grandmother Vo to her daughter, but instead of adding layers to the family history, the letters and fractured chronology does more than symbolize the fractured Truong family—it splinters the novel so that no one character or plotline becomes essential, least of all the title character’s.
Phan’s family saga has many riches, but it lacks the clear focus to become a standout debut.Pub Date: March 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-32268-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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