A review by mwgerard
Pioneer Girl by Bich Minh Nguyen

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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