She dreams of finding her way out and making a claim of her own, and it's through a story she invents about Rose Wilder and a pin her family received from a traveler back in Vietnam that sets her off to establish her own. “Everyone is always leaving each other, chasing down the next seeming opportunity—home or body. The novel has several suspenses that keep the reader’s interest because A wonderful read! The novel does really speak to me as a fellow nonwhite girl who was obsessed with Little House growing up, while being all too aware of its problems and knowing full well it didn't love us back. [I really liked this book. You settle. Her parents, particularly her mother and her grandfather, were almost always in the restaurant business: managing bad buffets mostly. The novel does really speak to me as a fellow nonwhite girl who was obsessed with Little House growing up, while being all too aware of its problems and knowing full well it didn't love us back. Imagine my surprise to find that, though this book has all the trappings of a memoir, Bich Minh Nguyen actually telling a quite made-up story. Her description of growing up in the Vietnamese diaspora is moving and real, and her descriptions of life in the Midwest are spot on. I have read so many secondary texts about Rose and Laura, but this one was really able to synthesize the material in a good and interesting way. [A] sincere and moving novel... a surprising synthesis of the personal and the public, the intimate and the epic, the historical and the fictional. You build a home and raise a family. As Lee explores the tenuous facts of this connection, she unearths more than expected—a trail of clues and enticements that lead her from the dusty stacks of library archives to hilarious prairie life reenactments and ultimately to San Francisco, where her findings will transform strangers’ lives as well as her own. Pioneer Girl is the story of a young woman whose brother has disappeared. February 6th 2014 Jobless with a PhD, Lee Lien returns home to her Chicago suburb from grad school, only to find herself contending with issues she’s evaded since college. Nguyen’s most recent book is the novel Pioneer Girl, published by Viking in 2014, about a Vietnamese-American family with mysterious ties to the real-life Laura Ingalls Wilder family. I really dug this; lots of moving parts and I liked the way they fit together. Pioneer Girl Bich Minh Nguyen No preview available - 2014. I really enjoyed the book, at heart it had a great biography about Rose Wilder Lane and a great analysis of what made her tick. Bich Minh Nguyen, author of "Pioneer Girl," said she thinks that modern immigrant families have some similar experiences to 19th-century pioneer families. AMAZON ... That said, it’s clear that Nguyen has a perceptive understanding of the tension between mothers and daughters and the troubling insights to be gained from digging into the past. Elegant, sharp-eyed, and very funny, Pioneer Girl is ultimately about how one finds kinship -- familial, cultural, literary -- that transcends the usual lexicon about identity and belonging. She may not want to admit to liking or loving the TV show, but, the books she loves, has always loved. Bich Minh Nguyen's Pioneer Girl is a powerful, intimate novel that honors the legacy of one of the country's most beloved children's writers while speaking to the alienation and conflicts that mark the generational and cultural divide of Asian American families. Get ready for some out-of-this-world reading and some insane near-realities with the science fiction and fantasy books that are catching the... Jobless with a PhD, Lee Lien returns home to her Chicago suburb from grad school, only to find herself contending with issues she’s evaded since college. . Somehow the very clear “a novel” printed on the front cover of the book escaped me completely. I hadn't even thought of that. Pioneer Girl offers a refreshing take on the “what if?” story. Vietnamese American woman coming to terms with her mothers passing, a surprising object and a missing brother. The surprising source of Bich Minh Nguyen’s enthralling second novel, Pioneer Girl, was her discovery that Laura Ingalls Wilder’s daughter Rose had traveled to Vietnam as a journalist in 1965. But when her brother disappears, he leaves behind an object from their mother’s Vietnam past that stirs up a forgotten childhood dream: a gold-leaf brooch, abandoned by an American reporter in Saigon back in 1965, that might be an heirloom belonging to Laura Ingalls Wilder. Earlier this year, stephenhongsohn also reviewed the novel. It was interesting how the author was able to contrast Rose's life to her life and how she grew up/ her relationship with her mom. It has an interesting premise: A Vietnamese coming-of-age story with a Little House connection. She was born and raised in the Midwest. 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