Reviewer
Lavanya Karthik: Lavanya is from Mumbai, India and is a licensed
architect and consultant in environmental management. She lives in
Mumbai with her husband and six-year old daughter. She loves reading
and enjoys a diverse range of authors across genres.
Author:Bich Minh Nguyen
Publisher: Viking
ISBN: 978-0-670-02081-2
Click Here To Purchase Short Girls: A Novel
Van and Linny Luong are as
different as it is possible for sisters to get – one, a plain Jane
overachiever who seems to have found success in love and her career;
the other - pretty , glamorous and directionless. Yet
both have secrets – Van’s husband has abruptly ended their
picture perfect marriage without explanation; Linny gets involved
with a married man just as she has begun establishing a
career. Even as both sisters struggle with heartbreak and
humiliation, they meet again at their father’s house to help
him celebrate his American citizenship. Surrounded by the
people and memories of their past, and connected by their shared
estrangement from their Vietnamese heritage, the sisters
hesitantly reach out to each other. Over the course of a few weeks,
they forge a new relationship that helps them resolve their own
personal issues.
Bich Minh Nguyen’s (pronounced Bit
Min Nwin) first book, Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, was a well received
memoir of her childhood and teenage years as a first generation
Vietnamese American . Much like that book, this one too is about
the search for identity and a sense of belonging, and each character
struggles with it in their own ways. If Van is suddenly forced
to be her own person after years of living upto the expectations of
others, Linny finds herself drawn to the very people and customs she
has spent her adult life trying to escape. Both sisters
in turn chafe against the filial ties that bind them to their
cantankerous father, even as they consider the possibility that
he may have been unfaithful to their deceased mother. Mr
Luong, after a lifetime of disillusionment with his adopted country,
accepts citizenship in a final bid for success as an inventor of
gadgets for short people. His obsession with shortness could just as
well be his reaction to his own feelings of alienation in America,
his appliances a way of being seen, heard and acknowledged in a land
he remains foreign to. There is even an interesting subplot
involving Van’s work as an immigration lawyer, and the increasing
difficulties faced by her clients in post 9/11 America.
Nguyen
examines her characters with a keen eye and a gentle touch – there
is a calm fluid quality to her prose that kept me riveted to the
book. Parallels to Jhumpa Lahiri and Amy Tan are evident, not
just in the common themes of inter-generational relationships
among immigrants , but also in the attention to the tiny
nuances of these complex, layered characters. And much like Tan
and Lahiri have done in their work, Nguyen too alternates her focus
between Van and Linny’s lives, revisiting their childhood through
the lenses of their respective memories.
The plot
does head for a rather conventional , crowd-pleasing end, which I
felt a little disappointed by, especially where the resolution of
Linny’s life is concerned. I was also a little baffled by the
graphics of the book cover, which do very little for the very
engaging story within.
Still, a compelling read
and a finely detailed study of the ties that bind us, confound
us and make us who we are.