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A Novel
by Thao Thai
Book Reviewed by:A sweeping, evocative debut novel following three generations of Vietnamese American women reeling from the death of their matriarch, revealing the family's inherited burdens, buried secrets, and unlikely love stories.
When Ann Tran gets the call that her fiercely beloved grandmother, Minh, has passed away, her life is already at a crossroads. In the years since she's last seen Minh, Ann has built a seemingly perfect life—a beautiful lake house, a charming professor boyfriend, and invites to elegant parties that bubble over with champagne and good taste—but it all crumbles with one positive pregnancy test. With both her relationship and carefully planned future now in question, Ann returns home to Florida to face her estranged mother, Huơng.
Back in Florida, Huơng is simultaneously mourning her mother and resenting her for having the relationship with Ann that she never did. Then Ann and Huơng learn that Minh has left them both the Banyan House, the crumbling old manor that was Ann's childhood home, in all its strange, Gothic glory. Under the same roof for the first time in years, mother and daughter must face the simmering questions of their past and their uncertain futures, while trying to rebuild their relationship without the one person who's always held them together.
Running parallel to this is Minh's story, as she goes from a lovestruck teenager living in the shadow of the Vietnam War to a determined young mother immigrating to America in search of a better life for her children. And when Ann makes a shocking discovery in the Banyan House's attic, long-buried secrets come to light as it becomes clear how decisions Minh made in her youth affected the rest of her life—and beyond.
Spanning decades and continents, from 1960s Vietnam to the wild swamplands of the Florida coast, Banyan Moon is a stunning and deeply moving story of mothers and daughters, the things we inherit, and the lives we choose to make out of that inheritance.
I loved each character and the way Thao Thai develops them literally and metaphorically. I really liked the way she goes back and forth from each, weaving an intense story of all the emotions humans deal with in life: love, hate, fear and hope. She makes the characters and settings come alive and totally engages the reader (Candace F). The mother-daughter relationships are so powerful, so real—sometimes so beautifully woven and other times so devastatingly fragile—that the book's power was a vital force (Theresa P). Banyan Moon is one of the most poignant, heartwarming books I have read in quite a while (Sheila S)...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by First Impressions Reviewers).
In Banyan Moon, author Thao Thai interweaves references to a Vietnamese folktale about a "man in the moon." In the story, a woodcutter called Chú Cuội is walking through the jungle one day when he sees a trio of tiger cubs. He approaches, thinking he might be able to catch one and sell it, then use the money to buy an ox. He manages to grab one of the cubs and begins his trek out of the jungle, when he suddenly hears the ferocious roar of the cubs' mother behind him. Chú Cuội scampers up a tree, dropping the tiger cub in the process. The cub suffers an injury to the head in the fall, and Chú Cuội watches in amazement as the mother tiger removes leaves from a banyan tree, chews them and applies them to the ...
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