Bich Minh Nguyen’s Short Girls
is a story of Vietnamese, second-generation immigrants Linny and Van Luong and their family. Their father, a loner and inventor, holding them at arms length, and their familial history is obscured by stories and silence. The story is broken into alternating chapters about each young woman, though written in a point of view that is more like an observer with each woman’s inner thoughts are revealed — much of this complaints or observations about how different they are from one another.
“The Luongs had always done this, scratching at each other’s words as much out of habit as anything. But this time when Thuy Luong had told her husband to go sleep in the basement “like a dog”he stayed there instead of slinking back upstairs.” (Page 4 of ARC)
Van is an immigration lawyer with the “perfect” life, or at least that’s how it seems to her sister, Linny. Linny, on the other hand, has a free life where she can act and do as she desires on a whim without responsibility — at least that’s how it seems to her sister. The tension between these sisters is vivid, but in many ways could have been better executed without the internal dialogue complaints about the other sister at every turn or before each memory surfaced to demonstrate their differences.
“She would have set the glass to shattering, sailed through someone else’s house, used up all the space that humans never reached.” (Page 53 of ARC)
Van’s world has been falling apart slowly, and now she is set adrift without a compass and without a husband. She struggles to keep her drama to herself and to overcome the emptiness in her home and her life. Meanwhile, Linny has to come to grips with her errors and her drifting life to make her dreams come true, while at the same time support her sister and her father, who continues to struggle to find success.
“Linny put in long hours experimenting shadows and liners, trying to make her eyes look bigger, deeper-set, less Asian. She painted plum colors up to her eyebrows and applied three coats of mascara. She ran peroxide-soaked cotton balls through her hair to create caramel highlights.” (Page 58 of ARC)
Nguyen’s Short Girls is a look at racial discrimination, height discrimination, immigrants looking for their place in a society that welcomes and shuns them, and finding once self amid the melting pot and one’s own family, while trying to accept your family’s own faults and ideas about success and love.
This is my 20th book for the 2010 New Authors Reading Challenge.
FTC Disclosure: Thanks to Library Thing Early Reviewers and the Viking for sending me a free copy of Short Girls for review. Clicking on title and image links will lead you to my Amazon Affiliate page; No purchase necessary, though appreciated.
© 2010, Serena Agusto-Cox of Savvy Verse & Wit. All Rights Reserved. If you’re reading this on a site other than Savvy Verse & Wit or Serena’s Feed, be aware that this post has been stolen and is used without permission.
begins with the journey of a young family to New Zealand from England, but once on foreign soil, the family is met with tragedy. Henry Oades leaves New Zealand for a new life in America where he becomes a farmer and rebuilds his life. The story is based upon a 19th century court case involving a man with two wives, according to Moran’s 
transports readers into another culture and the struggles that members find themselves in as the world around them evolves, causing clashes between modernity and the past. Told from the point of view of Saira, readers are taken on a very personal journey into the past, uncovering the deep secrets of Saira’s grandmother and grandfather as well as her own parents. The dynamic between Saira and her sister is only partially shown, with the point of view of Ameena silent. From fate to choices, each character must follow their path to the end — no matter what it holds for them.
, it is no wonder that she rebels against tradition and culture to become a traveling journalist.
by Jane Austen and 
, which merely inserts new sentences to achieve the goal of making the Bennets zombie slayers, Winters creates a story nearly all his own, but using Austen’s Dashwood sisters.
— and mixes it with ramped up social commentary a la Jane Austen. The latter half of the novel is the most action packed and is almost hurried along. But by the end, readers get swept up in adventure, myth, and outrageous challenges and have nothing to do but enjoy the ride. 
is a collection of cartoons that speak volumes about cat ownership and cat psyches. The cat has a one track mind — food. The cat finds a variety of ways to get his owner’s attention, including hitting him over the head with a baseball bat, like in this video. The cat has not only become a 
by Irene Howard
by Jeff Roberts 
by Georgette Heyer
by Sharon Lathan
is a pot of water on the stove that takes a long time to boil. Henry Lee is the main protagonist, but really his story happens nearly 45 years in the past, and those are the chapters that breathe and live. Much of the present day (1986) life of Henry Lee is somber and lifeless.
, is a thrill ride in a small, shoreline town in Massachusetts — Shoreham — as Holly Barrett meets the man of her dreams on a bus. Jack Dane is dashing, charming, and British — an accent to die for — but there is something below the surface that is not so inviting.
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, 
, 
(an Edgar Award nominee), 
, and 
, as well as the critically acclaimed memoir 
. The Organization of Chinese American Women named her the 2001 National Woman of the Year. She lives in Los Angeles, California. Please check out her 
