You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
4.06 AVERAGE
4.06 AVERAGE
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
reflective
medium-paced
challenging
dark
emotional
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
It was difficult at times to keep track of which character was speaking. A few times, I had to look back in the book to follow the story.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Emotional abuse, Genocide, Gore, Physical abuse, Abandonment
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
N/A
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
When the woman leading our book club discussion of Real Americans by Rachel Khong said that Khong writes without a plan, little gears aligned in my head and I thought, “Of course she doesn’t!” I can’t guarantee that she’s one of those “outlines are below me” authors, but it would fit. (For my opinions on this, see HERE.) I spent the first section of the book out of three (127 pages) wondering why I was being told this story at all. The last section felt comparatively frantic (but is so much more interesting) and references so many scenes, objects and people from the first part of the book (though many you’ve forgotten by now). And I ask, what would have been wrong with a plan (even if the outline had been made after the first draft)? Couldn’t we have avoided all this?
Synopsis: (This synopsis definitely has some spoilers, but is consistent with the blurbs on the book cover and the internet.) Lily is an unpaid intern approaching Y2K with no direction or close friends when she meets Matthew. He’s rich and handsome, and she’s not sure what she is except that she grew up Chinese-American in a household that was all-American. Twenty years later, Lily is on a secluded island on the west coast with her son Nick—no Matthew, no mom or dad. As Nick applies for colleges, he has questions about his family and where he came from, but the answers are more complicated than he could imagine. Across three generations, around the world, and during historic moments, we see how one family’s identity unfolds.
I thought this book had interesting ideas and real potential. Overall, though, I would call it okay. Khong’s first book (Goodbye, Vitamin) did have more critical acclaim, but this one is a Jenna’s Pick. I have realized lately that I enjoy literary fiction or genre fiction, and that popular-fiction—book-club-y stuff in the middle—is much less likely to land well with me. (But not never. I really enjoyed Where’d You Go Bernadette and The Great Believers, for example.) This book is good for book clubs, and I think most people who like approachable, pop lit will like this book. It is a bit long. And the structure is quite wonky. Some people at club were confused because of the structure. But here’s a hint: if you listen to the audio book, it is written in three sections: one from Lily’s perspective, one from Nick’s, and one from May’s. If you miss that, the third section can begin very confusing (I have been told by multiple readers). Another hint: their names are written on a page to tell you the POV shift. (Sorry. I’m being a bit of a stinker. I assume the audio does not make this clear?)
I want to begin with the beginning. For about two pages you are in an introduction that is like Will this be magic realism? That question will disappear for a very long time and even in the end you won’t exactly know the answer. But for the next 120 pages, you are going to hang out with a character who is all like, “I’m just little ol’ me. Nothing to see here. I’m pretty normal and boring.” Now, we find those MCs in plenty of books, but usually they are either wrong about themselves and we can see it pretty quickly, or something extraordinary happens to them so that we expect change. All I kept thinking for dozens and dozens of pages was, “I agree that you’re boring and there’s nothing to see here.” And eventually, “Why am I hearing your story at all?” A 120-page meet-cute with a lopsided couple from the POV of the boring one? Weird. Let me say this: Once you hit the end of the section, there is a bombshell of sorts that finally gets the wheels going on this train. And eventually there is some satisfaction and delivery. However, I fully support the idea that these three sections should have been woven together more so that we connect the generational dots easier and understand the point of the story sooner. Hot take? Doubt it. I think a re-read would reveal a lot of Easter eggs, but the first read-through should have delivered them in a series of “Aha!”s. The first section feels like the author is feeling out the story and getting to know the character. Once things picked up, she should have discarded or drastically re-written the first part, cutting most of it out and showing us much more than telling, which she could have done with increasing POV shifts. I think that if certain moments had sat next to one another in the narrative, it could have been stunning, beautiful. Easy for me to say, right? There is always a story behind every story, that of the author and their journey to publication. I don’t know how Khong ended up at this structure or how it stuck, but I do know there are some arguments that could be made for it. I wasn’t her editor. And I might have been a terrible one.
I was amused but also bummed when I came across this line on page 85: “I tried and failed to read the book I’d bought. It was a novel in which not much happened, each page a dense thicket of descriptive language and characters in overwrought contemplation, and I regretted the choice.” The only word I would change is “descriptive” to “prescriptive.”
But I didn’t hate this book. I didn’t even dislike it. I liked it? There are certainly things to appreciate. There were even book clubbers who liked the first two sections best and got lost in the third, while I was in the camp that slogged through much of the first two and thoroughly enjoyed the third (which has stronger historical novel elements, a lot more action/plot, and a much more interesting narrator).
There may have also been too many themes. One of my favorites was a little buried: who are your parents? Children never see their parents as who their parents see themselves as or who others see them as, and children seldom see their parents the same as their siblings do. Real Americans has been called three coming-of-age stories, and it is. To me, it felt like a long meet-cute (romance), then a boy going to college, then a historical novel that traces an entire life. It’s about fortune (both meanings of the word) and destiny and genes versus freewill and choices. One lady called it a page-turner, but I was just hanging on as it skimmed a whole lot of issues. It’s about classism, racism, and immigration—the story of America. It’s about secrets, generations of them. Eugenics. Is it science? Is is science fiction? Is it real? Or magic realism?
You might want to note that it was written after the 2016 election, Khong processing the idea of “real Americans” in relation to this point in history and what was being said about Americans and immigrants.
I read it reminded of the story of the Tower of Babel (like in the Bible/Pentateuch). Humans reaching for perfection and immortality. Is it even possible? Can it possibly go right?
You might want to look up tachyspsychia, though I question whether or not Khong was going for this as opposed to actual magic.
I would recommend this book for some readers and book clubs. I would tell those readers that if they found the beginning slow or dull, that they should hold on, especially for the third section. At any rate, there will be plenty to discuss at book club. For further insight, there are a number of interviews with the author and other explorations of the book online.
QUOTES:
“She was always doing this—asking questions about choices that had already been made” (p38).
“She gripped her mug and I noticed new spots on the backs of her hands, light brown circles. My immediate thought was a selfish one, that I should wear sunscreen there” (p38).
“It was dangerous to even leave the apartment because somehow I inevitably returned with twenty to forty fewer dollars than I had started out with, without understanding how. In this city, every encounter was a transaction, requiring money” (p42).
“My mother might have said that certain cells had been replaced by newer cells—skin cells, intestinal cells, red blood cells—where others, like my neurons and bones, had deteriorated” (p63).
“Matthew thought I was more special than I believed I was, Who was right, and who was wrong?” (p65).
“I adopted her belief in me: that I was small-minded—and would be for my entire life. Now I thought it was naive of her, too, to believe that particular moment—me so young, displaying a child’s typical response—represented anything” (p66).
“I was beginning to think it might be fine with me—being ordinary but happy. But this would never be acceptable to her” (p66).
“Falling in love didn’t seem to me a choice. It was disorientation” (p70).
“…and in that moment, what love was seemed so clear to me: the need to guard against loss” (p79).
“My mother’s voice seemed to come through the phone more hotly than other people’s did. During conversations my ear grew pained and sweaty” (p91).
“’I know,’ he said, and kissed me. ‘I know you.’ / This was the thing he said that I craved the most. More than I love you, I wanted him to say that he knew me. Who else did?” (p100).
“We were so happy together, we wanted to enlarge that happiness with a baby. It was a sort of greed—not for money or recognition, but for love” (p101).
“A big part of adulthood seemed to be checking email repeatedly” (p177).
“Love exposed you like a cooked fish, the skin peeled back” (p215).
“All he wanted was approval, and it had been withheld. How could I explain to him that I expected nothing, and was happier for it?” (p258).
“To someone with no use for it, it is garbage” (p265).
“This was an artist’s task, he explained, to observe. It was an artist’s work to be attuned to everything that surrounded him, even when it was easier not to notice…” (p273).
“I remembered reading Karl Marx, who said: ‘Men make their own hjhistory, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past’” (p280).
“It wasn’t until years later that I would understand that just because I could win an argument, it didn’t mean I was right” (p291).
“Every powerful man, possessing everything already, wanted the thing he couldn’t have: time” (p299).
“That my happiness was tinged with the fear that it would disappear was, I would understand only later, central to the thrill of love” (p302).
“But more people in America, those who are fed and clothed and housed, can choose what to care about. From your comfortable position you can decide if you want to know about people in Syria or Myanmar, with the flip of a television switch” (p311).
“With years, love grew complicated, burdened; it faded with washings, like dye from cloth. For a woman, as with most things, love was bound to be worse” (p331).
“I wondered, especially when I looked at Otto, if fortune was always good fortune. Maybe there was an amount of money that was as unfortunate as poverty could be” (p349).
“How had one man done so much damage? That was power, that one person could wield so much influence over the lives of strangers, I wondered if he suffered, in the end. Is it evil to say that I coped he’d suffered?” (p350).
“Once she believed that connection meant sameness, consensus, harmony. Having everything in common. And now she understood that the opposite was true: that connections was more valuable—more remarkable—for the fact of differences” (p363).
“Could love between and mother and child be anything but overwhelming?” (p363).
“As people we interrupted one another’s lives—that was what we did. If you sought to live your life without interruption you wound up like me: living life without interruption, totally alone” (p370).
“Later, I learned that life lay in the interruptions—that I had been wrong about life, entirely” (p370).
“Hearing a story—what did it accomplish? Nothing and everything” (p387).
“As though without a past we’d be unburdened, when in fact the opposite was true: In trying to leave the past behind, like a shadow, it followed you” (p390).
***REVIEW WRITTEN FOR THE STARVING ARTIST BLOG***
Synopsis: (This synopsis definitely has some spoilers, but is consistent with the blurbs on the book cover and the internet.) Lily is an unpaid intern approaching Y2K with no direction or close friends when she meets Matthew. He’s rich and handsome, and she’s not sure what she is except that she grew up Chinese-American in a household that was all-American. Twenty years later, Lily is on a secluded island on the west coast with her son Nick—no Matthew, no mom or dad. As Nick applies for colleges, he has questions about his family and where he came from, but the answers are more complicated than he could imagine. Across three generations, around the world, and during historic moments, we see how one family’s identity unfolds.
I thought this book had interesting ideas and real potential. Overall, though, I would call it okay. Khong’s first book (Goodbye, Vitamin) did have more critical acclaim, but this one is a Jenna’s Pick. I have realized lately that I enjoy literary fiction or genre fiction, and that popular-fiction—book-club-y stuff in the middle—is much less likely to land well with me. (But not never. I really enjoyed Where’d You Go Bernadette and The Great Believers, for example.) This book is good for book clubs, and I think most people who like approachable, pop lit will like this book. It is a bit long. And the structure is quite wonky. Some people at club were confused because of the structure. But here’s a hint: if you listen to the audio book, it is written in three sections: one from Lily’s perspective, one from Nick’s, and one from May’s. If you miss that, the third section can begin very confusing (I have been told by multiple readers). Another hint: their names are written on a page to tell you the POV shift. (Sorry. I’m being a bit of a stinker. I assume the audio does not make this clear?)
I want to begin with the beginning. For about two pages you are in an introduction that is like Will this be magic realism? That question will disappear for a very long time and even in the end you won’t exactly know the answer. But for the next 120 pages, you are going to hang out with a character who is all like, “I’m just little ol’ me. Nothing to see here. I’m pretty normal and boring.” Now, we find those MCs in plenty of books, but usually they are either wrong about themselves and we can see it pretty quickly, or something extraordinary happens to them so that we expect change. All I kept thinking for dozens and dozens of pages was, “I agree that you’re boring and there’s nothing to see here.” And eventually, “Why am I hearing your story at all?” A 120-page meet-cute with a lopsided couple from the POV of the boring one? Weird. Let me say this: Once you hit the end of the section, there is a bombshell of sorts that finally gets the wheels going on this train. And eventually there is some satisfaction and delivery. However, I fully support the idea that these three sections should have been woven together more so that we connect the generational dots easier and understand the point of the story sooner. Hot take? Doubt it. I think a re-read would reveal a lot of Easter eggs, but the first read-through should have delivered them in a series of “Aha!”s. The first section feels like the author is feeling out the story and getting to know the character. Once things picked up, she should have discarded or drastically re-written the first part, cutting most of it out and showing us much more than telling, which she could have done with increasing POV shifts. I think that if certain moments had sat next to one another in the narrative, it could have been stunning, beautiful. Easy for me to say, right? There is always a story behind every story, that of the author and their journey to publication. I don’t know how Khong ended up at this structure or how it stuck, but I do know there are some arguments that could be made for it. I wasn’t her editor. And I might have been a terrible one.
I was amused but also bummed when I came across this line on page 85: “I tried and failed to read the book I’d bought. It was a novel in which not much happened, each page a dense thicket of descriptive language and characters in overwrought contemplation, and I regretted the choice.” The only word I would change is “descriptive” to “prescriptive.”
But I didn’t hate this book. I didn’t even dislike it. I liked it? There are certainly things to appreciate. There were even book clubbers who liked the first two sections best and got lost in the third, while I was in the camp that slogged through much of the first two and thoroughly enjoyed the third (which has stronger historical novel elements, a lot more action/plot, and a much more interesting narrator).
There may have also been too many themes. One of my favorites was a little buried: who are your parents? Children never see their parents as who their parents see themselves as or who others see them as, and children seldom see their parents the same as their siblings do. Real Americans has been called three coming-of-age stories, and it is. To me, it felt like a long meet-cute (romance), then a boy going to college, then a historical novel that traces an entire life. It’s about fortune (both meanings of the word) and destiny and genes versus freewill and choices. One lady called it a page-turner, but I was just hanging on as it skimmed a whole lot of issues. It’s about classism, racism, and immigration—the story of America. It’s about secrets, generations of them. Eugenics. Is it science? Is is science fiction? Is it real? Or magic realism?
You might want to note that it was written after the 2016 election, Khong processing the idea of “real Americans” in relation to this point in history and what was being said about Americans and immigrants.
I read it reminded of the story of the Tower of Babel (like in the Bible/Pentateuch). Humans reaching for perfection and immortality. Is it even possible? Can it possibly go right?
You might want to look up tachyspsychia, though I question whether or not Khong was going for this as opposed to actual magic.
I would recommend this book for some readers and book clubs. I would tell those readers that if they found the beginning slow or dull, that they should hold on, especially for the third section. At any rate, there will be plenty to discuss at book club. For further insight, there are a number of interviews with the author and other explorations of the book online.
QUOTES:
“She was always doing this—asking questions about choices that had already been made” (p38).
“She gripped her mug and I noticed new spots on the backs of her hands, light brown circles. My immediate thought was a selfish one, that I should wear sunscreen there” (p38).
“It was dangerous to even leave the apartment because somehow I inevitably returned with twenty to forty fewer dollars than I had started out with, without understanding how. In this city, every encounter was a transaction, requiring money” (p42).
“My mother might have said that certain cells had been replaced by newer cells—skin cells, intestinal cells, red blood cells—where others, like my neurons and bones, had deteriorated” (p63).
“Matthew thought I was more special than I believed I was, Who was right, and who was wrong?” (p65).
“I adopted her belief in me: that I was small-minded—and would be for my entire life. Now I thought it was naive of her, too, to believe that particular moment—me so young, displaying a child’s typical response—represented anything” (p66).
“I was beginning to think it might be fine with me—being ordinary but happy. But this would never be acceptable to her” (p66).
“Falling in love didn’t seem to me a choice. It was disorientation” (p70).
“…and in that moment, what love was seemed so clear to me: the need to guard against loss” (p79).
“My mother’s voice seemed to come through the phone more hotly than other people’s did. During conversations my ear grew pained and sweaty” (p91).
“’I know,’ he said, and kissed me. ‘I know you.’ / This was the thing he said that I craved the most. More than I love you, I wanted him to say that he knew me. Who else did?” (p100).
“We were so happy together, we wanted to enlarge that happiness with a baby. It was a sort of greed—not for money or recognition, but for love” (p101).
“A big part of adulthood seemed to be checking email repeatedly” (p177).
“Love exposed you like a cooked fish, the skin peeled back” (p215).
“All he wanted was approval, and it had been withheld. How could I explain to him that I expected nothing, and was happier for it?” (p258).
“To someone with no use for it, it is garbage” (p265).
“This was an artist’s task, he explained, to observe. It was an artist’s work to be attuned to everything that surrounded him, even when it was easier not to notice…” (p273).
“I remembered reading Karl Marx, who said: ‘Men make their own hjhistory, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past’” (p280).
“It wasn’t until years later that I would understand that just because I could win an argument, it didn’t mean I was right” (p291).
“Every powerful man, possessing everything already, wanted the thing he couldn’t have: time” (p299).
“That my happiness was tinged with the fear that it would disappear was, I would understand only later, central to the thrill of love” (p302).
“But more people in America, those who are fed and clothed and housed, can choose what to care about. From your comfortable position you can decide if you want to know about people in Syria or Myanmar, with the flip of a television switch” (p311).
“With years, love grew complicated, burdened; it faded with washings, like dye from cloth. For a woman, as with most things, love was bound to be worse” (p331).
“I wondered, especially when I looked at Otto, if fortune was always good fortune. Maybe there was an amount of money that was as unfortunate as poverty could be” (p349).
“How had one man done so much damage? That was power, that one person could wield so much influence over the lives of strangers, I wondered if he suffered, in the end. Is it evil to say that I coped he’d suffered?” (p350).
“Once she believed that connection meant sameness, consensus, harmony. Having everything in common. And now she understood that the opposite was true: that connections was more valuable—more remarkable—for the fact of differences” (p363).
“Could love between and mother and child be anything but overwhelming?” (p363).
“As people we interrupted one another’s lives—that was what we did. If you sought to live your life without interruption you wound up like me: living life without interruption, totally alone” (p370).
“Later, I learned that life lay in the interruptions—that I had been wrong about life, entirely” (p370).
“Hearing a story—what did it accomplish? Nothing and everything” (p387).
“As though without a past we’d be unburdened, when in fact the opposite was true: In trying to leave the past behind, like a shadow, it followed you” (p390).
***REVIEW WRITTEN FOR THE STARVING ARTIST BLOG***
emotional
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Content Warnings
Minor: Sexual assault
challenging
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Content Warnings
Graphic: Racism, Rape, Sexual violence, Violence
Moderate: Infertility, Miscarriage, Medical content, Pregnancy
Minor: Death of parent
challenging
emotional
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes