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Daughters of the New Year
Daughters of the New Year: A Novel | E.M. Tran
1 post | 1 read | 3 to read
“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 lively, spellbinding tale about the extraordinary women within a Vietnamese immigrant family—and the ancient zodiac legend that binds them together What 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.
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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
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