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
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.
Eleven years ago, he broke her heart. But he doesn’t know why she never forgave him.
Toggling between past and present, two love stories unfold simultaneously. In the first, Macy Sorensen meets and falls in love with the boy next door, Elliot Petropoulos, in the closet of her dad’s vacation home, where they hide out to discuss their favorite books. In the second, Macy is working as a doctor and engaged to a single father, and she hasn’t spoken to Elliot since their breakup. But a chance encounter forces her to confront the truth: what happened to make Macy stop speaking to Elliot? Ultimately, they’re separated not by time or physical remoteness but by emotional distance—Elliot and Macy always kept their relationship casual because they went to different schools. And as a teen, Macy has more to worry about than which girl Elliot is taking to the prom. After losing her mother at a young age, Macy is navigating her teenage years without a female role model, relying on the time-stamped notes her mother left in her father’s care for guidance. In the present day, Macy’s father is dead as well. She throws herself into her work and rarely comes up for air, not even to plan her upcoming wedding. Since Macy is still living with her fiance while grappling with her feelings for Elliot, the flashbacks offer steamy moments, tender revelations, and sweetly awkward confessions while Macy makes peace with her past and decides her future.
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2801-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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