Things We Lost To The Water by Eric Nyugen

Let me start by saying that I really enjoyed this book, which I found because it was on Obama's summer reading list that came out a couple of months ago. I had mostly finished reading the one that came out six months earlier (I am just not a sci-fi fan and skipped that one book), and largely enjoyed it. This is the first book by this young author, and has the feel of a series of short stories that may be anchored in personal experience and that have been loosely strung. pretty successfully, together into a novel. The book is about a Vietnamese family in New Orleans and the story that the mother, Huong, tells herself about how she came to arrive in the United States with her two sons and without her husband. She tells them that he died, but the truth is that he stayed behind and built a different life for himself in Vietnam after the Americans left. Tuan, the older brother, chooses to keep his Vietnamese name and follows a path that included dropping out of school and finding fringe ways to make money, and the younger son changes his name to Ben, and while he finds America to be just as hard to navigate as Tuan, he gets a benefactor and an education. The paths of both boys are complicated and interesting, and I would read his next book.