Mỹ documents A novel

Nguyen (New Waves) draws on the legacy of the U.S. government's internment of Japanese Americans during WWII for this intelligent and chilling novel. After a series of explosions kills scores of people at six major airports in a coordinated terror attack, the perpetrators are revealed to have Vietnamese names. The government launches an internment program for Vietnamese people in the U.S., and the story follows the Nguyen family as they reckon with the upheaval to their lives. Ursula, an up-and-coming reporter, and Alvin, an intern at Google, receive work exemptions that save them from being sent to the camps. Their younger half-sister, Jen, declines her student exemption and joins her mother and her 15-year-old brother, Duncan, at Camp Tacoma (the four half-siblings' Vietnamese father abandoned them years earlier). While at the camp, Jen compiles a pamphlet about abuses there, which she smuggles to the outside via an underground network. The pamphlet reaches Ursula, whose star rises after she writes articles based on it. Nguyen delivers deep character work, especially with Jen, who grapples with the relief she feels after letting go of the pressure she'd internalized to succeed at school; and Ursula, whose Faustian bargain has tragic repercussions. This poignant narrative is an emotional roller coaster. Agent: Sarah Bowlin, Aevitas Creative Management. (Apr.)

Vietnamese Americans are sent to concentration camps in this all-too-plausible novel. The second novel from journalist Nguyen--followingNew Waves (2020)--starts with an account of Bà Nội, a woman who guides her family out of Vietnam after the fall of Saigon, winding up in the U.S., where her descendants now live. Four of those are the focus of this novel: Jen and Duncan and their older half-siblings, Ursula and Alvin, all of whom share the same absent father. They're typical young Americans: Jen is an NYU student and Duncan is a teenage football player, while Ursula is a journalist for a BuzzFeed-like news and entertainment site and Alvin is a new Google hire. Their lives are thrown into disarray when a series of airport bombings rocks America; when the people arrested turn out to have Vietnamese surnames, the siblings realize their lives might get much more complicated. The government reacts to the bombings by imprisoning Vietnamese Americans in concentration camps (or "assembly centers," as the government euphemizes them); Jen and Duncan are taken to one, but Ursula and Alvin get an exemption, possibly because their mother is white. Jen joins an underground resistance movement in the camp, feeding information to Ursula, who gains notice in the journalism world for her reports. This also puts Ursula at odds with some of her colleagues, one of whom writes a breezy "article" titled "These People Are Review-Bombing Detention Camps on Google Maps--And It's Giving Us Life." Nguyen's hand is a bit heavy here, but it's hard to argue with his pessimistic, and completely justified, view of the American government as a racist oligarchy deeply influenced by nefarious corporations. His narrative pacing is perfect, his dialogue and character development a bit less so; still, this is a compelling read. A disturbing page-turner and a powerful look at American racism. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.