pick
I was at a reception & E.M. Tran pulled an ARC out of her purse for me- so it went to the top of the TBR. Multigenerational family saga tracing a Vietnamese family in New Orleans back through time to Sài Gòn and beyond, with a focus on mother-daughter & sister conflicts, through the lens of birth year animals and elements. Pulls one of my fav literary tricks: the narrators are reliable-ish but lead readers to make bad assumptions on partial info.
akaGingerK The first half is focused on the contemporary sisters and their mother, and the changing limited POVs of each chapter allow an increasingly complex, complicated version of the mother, Xuan, to be unveiled. Each chapter takes us back in time, by jumps that start small & increase as we go. CW for off-page sexual assault (edited) 2y