Description: "Daughters of the New Year is engrossing and exhilarating... unifying and contorting a family tied by love, debts, humor, and ghosts. Tran has turned the question of what a family can be into a complex, heartfelt mural of possibility." -Bryan Washington, author of Memorial and Lot A captivating debut novel that moves backwards in time to trace five generations of Vietnamese mothers and daughters, drawing on Vietnamese zodiac astrology to chart the fateful events of their livesWhat does the future hold for those born in the years of the Dragon, Tiger, and Goat?In present day New Orleans, Xuan Trung, former beauty queen turned refugee after the Fall of Saigon, is obsessed with divining her daughters' fates through their Vietnamese zodiac signs. But Trac, Nhi and Trieu diverge completely from their immigrant parents' expectations. Successful lawyer Trac hides her sexuality from her family; Nhi competes as the only woman of color on a Bachelor-esque reality TV show; and Trieu, a budding writer, is determined to learn more about her familial and cultural past.As the three sisters begin to encounter strange glimpses of long-buried secrets from the ancestors they never knew, the story of the Trung women unfurls to reveal the dramatic events that brought them to America. Moving backwards in time, E.M. Tran takes us into the high school classrooms of New Orleans, to Saigon beauty pageants, to twentieth century rubber plantations, traversing a century as the Trungs are both estranged and united by the ghosts of their tumultuous history.A "haunted story of resilience and survival" (Meng Jin, Little Gods), Daughters of the New Year is an addictive, high-wire act of storytelling that illuminates an entire lineage of extraordinary women fighting to reclaim the power they've been stripped of for centuries.Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.
Brief description:
E.M. Tran is a Vietnamese American writer from New Orleans, Louisiana. Her stories, essays and reviews can be found in such places as Joyland magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Thrillist and Harvard Review Online. Her essay for Prairie Schooner won their Summer Nonfiction Prize, a Glenna Luschei Award and was listed as a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2018. She completed her MFA at the University of Mississippi and a PhD in creative writing at Ohio University.
Review Quotes:
"Polyphonic, epic, and tender, this searching portrait of three sisters moves fearlessly back in time, unearthing legacies of colonial violence and war. A haunted story of resilience and survival."
-- "Meng Jin, author of Little Gods"