When I picked up Nghi Vo’s debut novel The Chosen and the Beautiful, I was excited to get a more femme retelling of one of my favorite books of all time, The Great Gatsby. What I ended up getting was a new mantra: if white men can rewrite history, women of color can rewrite their books. Let’s face it, literature has stood the test of time better than history, anyway.
Read MoreBuild Your House Around My Body by Violet Kupersmith is one of the best books I’ve read in recent years. It is a brilliant, symbolic exploration of colonialism, generational trauma, women’s bodies, and the history of place. And it’s all told as a ghost story. Yes, I am obsessed. No, I will not stop recommending this book to my friends.
Read MoreIn The Mountains Sing, Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai weaves a story about 20th-century Việt Nam spanning four generations—from the Japanese occupation and the Great Hunger in the 1930s and 40s to the brutal Land Reform, and the Việt Nam war and its aftermath in the 1980s. The chapters alternate between two main characters the grandmother and granddaughter, as one looks back at the past and the sacrifices she has had to make to keep her family alive, and the other looks towards the future, and the hope of a life without hostility.
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