THE FAMILY RECIPE

Five estranged siblings must uproot their lives in order to win their father’s inheritance.

Jude, Jane, Bingo, Paulina, and Georgia Trân have never been close. Their mother, Evelyn, disappeared when they were young, leaving them in Houston to be raised by their father, Duc, the head of a banh mi shop empire. The four daughters spent their youth just waiting to turn 18 and leave home; Jude, the lone son, was the only one to stay behind, siding with their father. Now the siblings, in their 20s and early 30s, have been called back to the family home by Huey Ngô, their father's lawyer and best friend, who informs the five siblings that in the next year they must each accomplish a task that's been set by their father: All four sisters are being sent to a failing shop—one each in Houston, Philadelphia, San Jose, and New Orleans—and told to make it successful again. Jude, meanwhile, has to get married. Whoever finishes first wins the entire inheritance. As the siblings start on their projects, they re-examine their lives, their relationships, and what their family actually means to them. Huynh jumps among the characters' perspectives as well as jumping in time, slowly revealing the story of the Trân parents' origins from the time they fled Vietnam to the morning Evelyn left; the story also moves forward as each sibling learns from their ordeal. While this book is clearly filled with love for its characters and Vietnamese American culture, it’s an epic family drama squashed into the length of an average novel. The ideas and the writing are good, but they needed more room to breathe.

A family story big on plot but short on characterization.