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Thank you to NetGalley and Hanover Square Press for allowing me to read this ARC!
Content Warning: death, violence, racism, misogyny, emotional abuse, sexual harassment, rape, colonization.
The Trung family lives in modern-day New Orleans, Louisiana. The three daughters are all completely different, but each is striving for her own kind of peace and freedom in her life: Trac, the eldest, a respected lawyer who is coming to terms with her sexuality; Nhi, who has joined a dating show in the hopes of making it big as an actress; and the baby of the family, Trieu, who is finding it difficult to find her place in life at all. Their mother, Xuan, the former Saigon beauty queen of 1973, tries desperately to determine her daughters' fates through the usage of the Vietnamese Zodiac, but in her attempts, ends up pushing them further away from her. As they all try to come to terms with both their pasts and their inevitable futures, E.M. Tran traces the lineage of the Trung women through history, asking questions about the value of learned histories, and what it means to be a daughter and a mother.
The concept of tracing a female line of ancestors back through time is what sold this book to me. As someone who absolutely loves generational stories that deal with the history of a singular family, I had a feeling that E.M. Tran's Daughters of the New Year would be something that would offer both something new to me, and something familiar that I already adore. Even in my quest to read more diverse books, I've actually read few novels by Vietnamese authors, and I was so excited to pick this up and delve into a story that deals with some of Vietnam's complicated past while never forgetting to center the powerful female characters that make this so compulsively readable.
The story starts with Xuan Trung, the Metal Tiger mother of the three Trung girls, as she tries to divine their fate for the coming New Year. We quickly get the feeling that the girls feel both drawn to their mother's stories, even as they struggle with their mixed disdain and love for their mother's forceful belief in the Zodiac and astrology. All of the characters in this book are equally strong, and although it's usually a given that I'll have a favorite when reading something with multiple POV characters, this time, I felt entranced by every single woman that Tran puts on the page. Although this story deals with themes of racism, being an outsider, and most especially the complicated relationships unique to immigrant families, any daughter or mother reading this -- no matter where she's from, who she is, or the particular circumstances that make up her life -- will instantly see themselves in the Trung women.
Tran's exploration of generational pain and trauma is powerful. She asks the important question that has plagued families since the dawn of time: how important are learned histories, and when and how should they be relayed to children? There's no real "right" answer, but even painful histories are important, particularly, I think, to the children of immigrants. The desire to know where your family comes from, what has shaped them into who they are, is something all of us yearn for.
My only complaints with this book are mainly selfish: the timeline goes backwards, and so we have only our own imagination when it comes to what happens to Tran, Nhi, Trieu and their mother! I would have loved to see a bit of closure, but honestly, I think that's another element of what Tran is talking about here -- for many families, there is no "closure." Perhaps Xuan will never be able to talk about the fall of Saigon, or her life before Vietnam was torn in two. Perhaps the girls will never quite find the answers they're looking for. It's a meditation on the sometimes unspeakable past. There were moments where Tran's writing could be a bit simplistic, losing me a little, but the story itself is so powerful that it didn't alter my rating by much.
Highly recommended!
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