Poetic Memoirs, Saigon Beauty Queens, and More!

This follows five generations of Trung women, a Vietnamese family based in New Orleans and Vietnam. This stands out amongst similar family sagas, though, because it goes backwards in time instead of forwards. Starting in the present day, we see how former beauty queen Xuan Trung obsessively tries to map out her daughters’ futures, only for them to forge paths that are nothing like what their immigrant parents expected for them. Throughout the novel, they learn of the secrets of their ancestors, and how everything from beauty pageants to plantations led them to the Americas.

I’ve been excited to talk about this one for a while. In it, Alice Sun struggles with her status as a scholarship kid at an elite international boarding school in Beijing. She finds that one day her figurative feelings of being invisible turn into her actually being invisible. And, once her parents tell her they can longer afford to pay for her tuition that isn’t covered by the scholarship, she decides to monetize her new powers. She uses her invisibility to find out messy life details of her fellow students, but the seemingly small tasks she takes on turn more criminal — slippery slope and all that — and she’ll have to decide just how much her conscience is worth.