Daughters of the new year A novel

Falling backward through time, Tran's debut follows the women of the Trung family in New Orleans and Vietnam. At Lunar New Year, Xuan reads her three daughters' horoscopes in order to warn them of the risks particular to their zodiac signs in the coming year. Growing up, Trac, Nhi, and Trieu feel both too Americanized for the Vietnamese community, and not American enough for the white community. The gulf between Xuan and her daughters is further exacerbated by language barriers and unspoken family history. The daughters' relationships to their now-divorced parents is shaped by guilt and obligation. After introducing the Trung daughters as adults, the narrative traces back to Xuan's youth in Saigon as she enters a beauty pageant. Her mother, Tiên, plans for her family's escape as the U.S. military is pulling out of South Vietnam. Tiên's mother's and grandmother's chapters give additional depth to the Trungs' lost family history. Layered with magical realism, Tran's novel is a complex meditation on history, memory, and what each generation carries.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: With a large print run and comparisons to Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing (2016) and Chloe Benjamin's The Immortalists (2018), expect lots of curiosity about (and demand for) this debut.

Tran debuts with a complex story involving many generations of a Vietnamese family's women and their resilience. Xuan flees the fall of Saigon in 1975 for the U.S. with her mother and sister, losing her home, family wealth, and social standing. In the years after, she has three daughters and charts the family's future with a complex zodiac almanac, as the trauma of dislocation and war manifests in her being ever ready for disaster. Now, in 2016, Trac, the eldest, is a successful lawyer, refusing to submit to her father's plans and hiding her sexuality from her parents. Aspiring actress Nhi, the middle sister, wanders off the set of a reality show in Saigon and disappears. Trieu, the youngest, hopes to live up to her mother's expectations by becoming a writer. Later, Xuan reveals how she and her mother managed to escape Saigon, and that tragic story sheds light on the difficulties faced by the three daughters. Tran further complicates the legacy with stories of the women's ancestors who resisted third-century Chinese occupation and 19th-century French imperialism. Though the many threads can be hard to follow, and Tran's decision to abandon Xuan's daughters' story lines will frustrate readers, she does an excellent job at conveying the cyclical nature of family and political history. Though a bit unwieldy, there are plenty of powerful moments. Agent: Eloy Bleifuss, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Oct.)

DEBUT Tran's first novel opens in 2016 New Orleans with matriarchal divorcee Xuan Trung making sure to give horoscopes for the coming lunar new year, based on the Vietnamese zodiac, to each of her three adult daughters: corporate lawyer Trac, aspiring actress Nhi, and Trieu, the youngest, an aspiring writer who works in a gym. Starting off as a single story about a contemporary Vietnamese American family, the narrative gradually unfolds to reveal a beautifully told multigenerational tale tracing the family's history and genealogy back to the French-owned rubber plantations of Vietnam. Tran writes fluidly as she introduces each character, loosely stringing together their stories with the revelation and meaning of their lunar zodiac signs; identifiable tales of prejudice and strife are unraveled among various ages, genders, and cultures throughout. VERDICT It's disappointing that Xuan and her daughters are not revisited once the narrative returns to the past, but Tran's debut is an engrossing story of the ties among mothers, daughters, and sisters, sprinkled with humor and intrigue. Fans of the strong women protagonists of Min Jin Lee's Pachinko or Nguyen Phan Que Mai's The Mountains Sing will likely appreciate this less intensively told family story. Also good for book groups.--Shirley Quan