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A review by ruthiella
Pioneer Girl by Bich Minh Nguyen
3.0
“Where does it stop? Does it ever? I want to believe it all leads to something grander than the imagination, grander than the end-of stop of the Pacific. Or is that it; You get to the place where you land; you are tired now; you settle.”
I bought this book on a total whim, knowing nothing about it. I was ever so pleasantly surprised to find it about a recent PhD graduate whose obsession with Laura Ingalls Wilder and her own Vietnamese family history intersect in an interesting way. In fact, I read Little House in the Big Woods (for the first time as an adult) because I was so inspired by this title.
Nguyen makes interesting parallels between the relationship of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane and the main character’s difficult connection to her own immigrant mother as well as between the life of a white settler moving ever westward in the 19th century in search of a better life and that of an immigrant landing in the U.S. in the 20th century. Sometimes the reach is a little strained, but over all I really enjoyed the story and the characters.
I bought this book on a total whim, knowing nothing about it. I was ever so pleasantly surprised to find it about a recent PhD graduate whose obsession with Laura Ingalls Wilder and her own Vietnamese family history intersect in an interesting way. In fact, I read Little House in the Big Woods (for the first time as an adult) because I was so inspired by this title.
Nguyen makes interesting parallels between the relationship of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane and the main character’s difficult connection to her own immigrant mother as well as between the life of a white settler moving ever westward in the 19th century in search of a better life and that of an immigrant landing in the U.S. in the 20th century. Sometimes the reach is a little strained, but over all I really enjoyed the story and the characters.