Review by New York Times Review
FIRST BITE: How We Learn to Eat, by Bee Wilson. Illustrated by Annabel Lee. (Basic Books, $16.99.) So much of what forms our "chaotic" relationships with food - our likes and dislikes, willingness to experiment and even our nostalgic attachments - we develop as infants. But rather than view food habits as fixed and immutable, Wilson lays out strategies to gradually "unlearn" troubling behaviors and tastes. DRAGONFISH, by Vu Tran. (Norton, $15.95.) A troubled Vietnamese refugee in Oakland suddenly leaves behind her husband and reappears in Nevada; as he searches for his wife, he is dragged through both Las Vegas's ugly underbelly and the horrors of her past. Our reviewer, Chris Abani, called Tran's novel "a renegotiation of terms in which the past is not a place of nostalgia but one that carries all the trauma of war, and the present is not enough to mitigate that." BATTLING THE GODS: Atheism in the Ancient World, by Tim Whitmarsh. (Vintage, $16.95.) In the roughly 1,000-year period Whitmarsh studies, godlessness was one of a number of acceptable religious views. Religion, for the Greeks, was part and parcel of civil engagement; it was not until they were absorbed by the Roman Empire that society became largely Christianized, and godlessness scorned. THE MARK AND THE VOID, by Paul Murray. (Picador, $17.) In the midst of the Irish banking crisis, Paul, a thwarted novelist, asks to shadow Claude, a French analyst in Dublin, at work, as inspiration for a new project. But what Paul really has in mind is a setup for a heist: He's looking to reverse his fortunes by robbing a bank, not literary success. The deeply amoral financial sector is a prime target for Murray's rollicking caper. MY HISTORY: A Memoir of Growing Up, by Antonia Fraser. (Anchor, $16.) The author, a British historian known for her biography of Mary Queen of Scots, reflects on her aristocratic childhood and literary passions. Our reviewer, Liesl Schillinger, called Fraser's account "the history of a writer's love affair with her vocation, and her nostalgia for the childhood 'wonderland' that engendered it." GOLD FAME CITRUS, by Claire Vaye Watkins. (Riverhead, $16.) In Watkins's dystopian California, virtually all the region has been evacuated after a blistering drought, but Ray and Luz are among the few holdouts, choosing instead to scavenge and take shelter in an abandoned mansion. But after they find a toddler (though not the marauders to which she seems to belong), the couple are motivated to seek a better life for themselves and the child. DESTINY AND POWER: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush, by Jon Meacham. (Random House, $20.) Meacham, an executive editor at Random House and former editor of Newsweek, is sympathetic to his subject, tracing the 41st president's political ascent and stumbles. The account is particularly cleareyed about the elder Bush's influence on his son's presidential tenure, and reveals some of his opinions about George W.'s decisions.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 10, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
In Las Vegas, white Oakland cop Robert finds himself in a Vietnamese gangster's elaborate underground bunker surrounded by floor-to-ceiling aquariums containing stingrays, sharks, and a dragonfish, an endangered Asian species believed to bring good luck, keep evil away, bring the family together. But there is no way this glimmering creature is going to protect anyone from anything in Vu Tran's nuanced and elegiac, noirish first novel. Robert's ex-wife, Hong, whom he calls Suzy, is debilitated by sorrow and haunted by ghosts and guilt. Her second husband, Vegas high-roller Sonny, has badly beaten her, and brooding Robert intends to avenge her, diving heedlessly into a world of secrets and anguish he cannot decipher. While lacerating flashbacks disclose the harrowing details of Hong's perilous boat exodus from war-torn Vietnam and precarious interlude in a Malaysian refugee camp, bumbling Robert discovers the true source of her suffering. Vu Tran takes a strikingly poetic and profoundly evocative approach to the conventions of crime fiction in this supple, sensitive, wrenching, and suspenseful tale of exile, loss, risk, violence, and the failure to love.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Tran's thriller debut revolves around an elusive woman who seems lost in her own private-and haunted-world. Robert Ruen is an Oakland, Calif., police officer whose Vietnamese ex-wife, Suzy, has remarried a shady Las Vegan gambler named Sonny Van Nguyen, a figure with whom she shares a distant past. When Suzy disappears, Ruen is strong-armed by Sonny's son, Junior, to help track down the woman Ruen never really knew. His search transpires in a wonderfully noirish Las Vegas, including second-tier casinos and strip-mall restaurants concealing underground aquariums stocked with illegal and exotic creatures-the titular dragonfish among them. Interspersed with Ruen's quest is Suzy's own first-person narrative about fleeing with her daughter war-torn Vietnam by boat for a Malaysian refugee camp. These long sections, addressed to the daughter she abandoned upon reaching the States, occasionally interrupt the novel's momentum. However, they also feature the strongest writing and elegantly reveal the roots of Suzy's mercurial behavior: "Everything that has happened since seems a shadow of what happened there." This is a most enjoyable mystery, from its distinct, dazzling premise all the way to its satisfying conclusion. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
A young, confused Vietnamese woman leaves her dying husband and native home as communists lay waste to her life. In a Malaysian camp with her young daughter, Hong meets Sonny, another refugee with a son, and together they form an alliance. Revealing her story in flashback fits and starts, Hong speaks in sparse, cryptic passages intermixed with longer, more clearly delineated chapters narrated by her second husband, Oakland police officer Robert, who calls her Suzy. Hong's life is a meandering, tangled knot resulting in severe depression, which Robert finds irksome. Leaving -Robert, she turns to Sonny, now a cruel smuggler, gambler, and alcoholic. Once again married to Sonny and living in Las Vegas, Hong suffers domestic abuse and then goes missing. Sonny, with the help of Sonny Jr., forces Robert to find Hong. In Vegas, Robert uncovers layers of Hong's past, her relationship to Sonny, and his own foibles. VERDICT This haunting and mesmerizing debut is filled with all the noir elements-a dark and seedy underworld, damsels in distress, tarnished heroes, and a blurring of moral boundaries. It examines such themes as culture, desperation, memory, mental illness, love, loss, and redemption. Highly recommended for mystery fans. [See Prepub Alert, 3/2/15.]-Jeffrey W. Hunter, Royal Oak, MI © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A missing person mystery is delicately entwined with a heartbreaking story of migration and loss. The Vietnam of the past and the Las Vegas of the present are vividly evoked in this debut novel in which hard-boiled noir is seamlessly blended with reminiscences of exile. A two-fisted policeman from Oakland, California, finds both his life and sense of certainty upended by Suzy, the Vietnamese wife who abandoned him with thwarted desires and unanswered questions. It turns out he's not the only ex-husband looking for her. She's now fled from a short-tempered smuggler named Sonny, who's also a refugee from the fall of Saigon and leans on the reluctant cop hard enough to make him search her last-known whereabouts, Vegas. What the cop finds, to his surprise, is Suzy's estranged daughter, Mai, a professional poker player who's something of a tough-talking, hard-boiled case herself; though he also recognizes in Mai more than just a strong physical resemblance to Suzy: "I could see her mother's stubbornness.All the loneliness that comes with refusing anything sensible the world gives you." The author intersperses the mercurial tale of the search with long, detailed letters written to Mai by Suzy recounting the wrenching, often perilous passage from Vietnam in the mid-1970s to a Malaysian refugee camp. It is in this testimony that Tran's writing achieves a fluidity and grace that make you share his enigmatic antiheroine's aching loss and sense of dislocation. (One of the most resonant of these memories involves using pork fat to help gas up a boat used for escaping Vietnam and how it makes the hungry passengers remember restaurants and kitchens of their past lives.) He's on less solid footing bringing the policeman's first-person narrative to life but nonetheless skillfully identifies the roots of whatever is stalking Mai, Suzy, and others with recriminations and regrets; much like the Vietnam War itself, which created such torment and whose sorrowful legacy resounds generations later. Right off the bat, Tran displays the most admirable and worthwhile gift a serious thriller writer can have: compassion toward even the most disreputable of his characters. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
