Reviews

Pioneer Girl by Bich Minh Nguyen

mwgerard's review against another edition

4.0

A quick description of this book sounds highly bizarre and unlikely to hang together. A brother and sister are first generation Vietnamese Americans, struggling to find their own identities while respecting their mother and grandfather’s fierce loyalties to their heritage. As a child, our narrator loved the Little House on the Prairie series of books. She even interwove tiny details from those stories into her own life. Now an out-of-work post-doctoral academic, she has returned home while searching for a job. Her new /old surroundings rekindle familial memories and tensions. As an adult, she has reason to believe she actually does have a slight connection to the Depression Era writer a half a world away.

Nguyen’s writing is clear and succinct. It does take about 40 pages to get going, but once it does, it is fast-paced and engaging. Her “list” descriptions of nondescript midwestern living are spot-on:

And, as always, were were renters. First apartment, then duplexes, and finally a whole house: your standard middling ranch, bricked, carpeted, and vinyled, in a neighborhood where tricycles were left to rust in the winter, TV satellite dished clung like bats to eaves, and empty houses still had Beware of Dog signs stuck to mental fences. ~Loc. 281

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bookwormmichelle's review against another edition

4.0

This one pretty much had me at hello. Cute story, easy read. A Vietnamese-American, second-generation, pursues a mystery involving Rose Wilder Lane while trying to find her place in the world and make sense out of her family. All the while, reflecting on Laura Ingalls Wilder and her family's wanderlust and travels across America. I just about automatically love anyone who loved the Little House books as a child, and this was a fresh take on them through the eyes of a second generation American. Fun little story.

lisaf's review against another edition

5.0

I truly enjoyed this book. Nguyen wove my favorite books from childhood into a modern day mini mystery and once I started reading, I didn't sit it down.

leighkaisen's review against another edition

Pioneer Girl weaves together the story of Lee, a Vietnamese-American young woman, and a gold pin talisman as a symbol of her family’s connection to Laura Ingalls Wilder, her daughter Rose, and the timeless stories of Little House on the Prairie. While the literary mystery element could have been grander in scope, the fact that it wasn’t perhaps made this archival search for imagined uncovered histories more realistic. Lee’s own search for self apart from her family--to dream of another place, career, and identity outside of her family’s restaurant and cultural expectations--resembles the Ingalls’ journey West, the ongoing search for better dreams. A closer look at the relationship between Laura and Rose also parallels Lee’s tensions with her mother. Bich Minh Nguyen sews these subtleties together to draw interesting perspectives between past and present, nostalgia and one’s roots, the ideal and the disappointments, and the search to find new meanings in the same old stories.

Related recommendations: [b:The Wilder Life My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie|8619825|The Wilder Life My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie|Wendy McClure|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1279830961s/8619825.jpg|13490463] by Wendy McClure; [b:Confessions of a Prairie Bitch How I Survived Nellie Oleson and Learned to Love Being Hated|7284508|Confessions of a Prairie Bitch How I Survived Nellie Oleson and Learned to Love Being Hated|Alison Arngrim|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1280695574s/7284508.jpg|8507071] by Alison Arngrim

kellyhager's review against another edition

4.0

THIS BOOK.

You remember that fairly recently I mainlined my way through the Little House on the Prairie books which, somehow, I managed to not read as a child. This book managed to bring the delight of that back.

Granted, it's more about Lee's life and family but there are obviously a lot of parts that deal with Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter, Rose. This book is so smart and funny and touching, and I absolutely loved Lee.

I love the idea that you could somehow find a connection in your life to books that are so important to you---and actual connections, not just "Oh, I love this book and this other person loves this book so clearly we are bashert." I mean that you could somehow find an artifact from a book in your own life. But that's like that Cornelia Funke series, right? Inkheart? Well, not in this book.

But, like I said earlier, the thing that makes this book so amazing is the fact that Lee seems like someone we know. She has complicated relationships with her family and isn't entirely sure she's on the right career path. And then she stumbles across this mystery that has a direct connection to her life, and it's like it reinvigorates her.

This book is a perfect surprise in the best way.

Highly recommended.

lucyb's review against another edition

3.0

I think there should be more books like this one: it's deliberately light reading, but it's also surprisingly lyrical, and surprisingly profound. Its protagonist, Lee, is a Vietnamese-American who's a recent Ph.D.: she's a scholar of physical place/space and spiritual belonging, and although she, disillusioned, often dismisses her work on Wharton as irrelevant to her lived experiences, it's poignantly easy for the reader to see the parallels between Wharton's feverishly anxious, grasping, lost protagonists, and the narrator herself. The texts Lee is most fascinated by, though, are the Little House on the Prairie books: canonical favorites of childhood (mine as well as hers) but also a narrative of the failures and exigencies of the so-called American dream. Here is where Lee finds resonances with her own life, and she chases questions of authorship, truth, and belonging through multiple research libraries and across vast, desolate expanses of the land taken by those who believed in manifest destiny. As an academic, I twitched whenever she stole a document (yes, this happened more than once.) But as a reader, I find myself still reflecting on the poignancy of this: as a victim of the "American dream" narrative, the only way Lee can imagine asserting her right to analyze this history, to critique it, to wrestle with it... is to take without asking, for asking leads only to denial. In many ways, yes, it's a sad book; but it's also, ultimately, a hopeful one, celebrating the unreasonable perseverance of those laboriously staking out their places in the world.

thefictionaddictionblog's review against another edition

4.0

I was happy to get the eARC for Bich Minh Nguyen’s Pioneer Girl, because it was described as a novel about a Vietnamese-American grad student researching Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane. The key to the mystery is a golden brooch, that resembles the description of a gift Almanzo gives Laura in These Happy Golden Years. An American journalist called Rose left it in a Saigon cafe in the 60s, and now the granddaughter of that cafe owner wonders if that journalist might really have been Rose Wilder Lane.

The Lien family and the Ingalls-Wilder family share more than just possibly the gold cabin pin. As Lee Lien investigates Rose’s papers, she also starts to uncover more about her family and the topics they don’t discuss. We also see parallels between the Ingalls family’s travels, always in search of a better place, and the Lien family, immigrating from Vietnam and then moving throughout the Midwest.

Read the full review (contains mild spoilers).

wictory's review against another edition

4.0

If you ever imagined traveling across the country in a covered wagon with your trusty bulldog trotting along behind you, if you know more than would be expected about making headcheese, or if you ever wanted to slap Nellie Oleson across the face for being rude to Ma, then you show classic signs of being addicted to Little House. And you are not alone.

Pioneer Girl by Bich Minh Nguyen is the story of Lee Lien, a first-generation American daughter of Vietnamese immigrants, who spent her childhood reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series in the backseat as her family crisscrossed the Midwest, running one tacky Asian buffet after another. Lee is now grown and in possession of a English Literature Ph.D, but no job offers. In returning to live with her short-tempered mother and goodnatured grandfather, Lee stumbles upon a family heirloom that may prove a connection to Rose Wilder Lane, daughter of Lee’s beloved Laura Ingalls Wilder. As she chases down clues to prove her theory, she struggles with the everyday realities of her own family.

Nguyen draws some striking parallels between her story and that of the real life and fictionalized versions of the Ingalls Wilder characters. There’s the “missing pieces” of the Ingalls’ family’s real life that are not depicted in the books, such as the birth and death of a son and a stint as innkeepers in Iowa, which relates to the unknowable things in Lee’s own family history, such as the impact of her grandfather’s Saigon cafe on a traveling American writer, the circumstances of her father’s death, or the true state of her mother’s relationship with a family friend. The fraught relationship between the real life mother and daughter Laura and Rose is mirrored in Lee’s interactions with her own mother. Even Laura’s “itchy foot” desire to move ever westward appears as Lee follows her investigation from Illinois to the California coast.

This is the story of a young woman who must go back in order to go forward and how you never know what you might find between the covers of a book.It’s an excellent read whether you exhibit symptoms of Little House obsession or not, but readers of the Little House series will be appreciative of hints of Nguyen’s own obvious adoration.

jessicaesquire's review against another edition

3.0

I am a fan of Nguyen, but I was disappointed in this novel. It has a promising setup: Lee is the daughter of Vietnamese immigrants struggling to get by in the Midwest and stumbles upon a potential connection between her family and Rose Wilder Lane, the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder who visited Vietnam. It sends Lee on a quest to find out more about Rose and Laura, which coincides with discovering secrets of her own family.

What hurt the book most for me was regular violations of one of the main rules of good writing: show, don't tell. But Lee is constantly telling us what she learns about Rose and Laura, how it's similar to her own life. Nguyen doesn't let the story and the parallels play out, instead Lee is constantly telling us everything she finds.

I also wish there was more passion. Lee's sense of stagnancy seemed to drag down the book. I wanted some passion and fight in there somewhere.