Daughters of the New Year

A Novel

By: E.M. Tran

Narrated by: Lulu Lam

“Daughters of the New Year is engrossing and exhilarating... unifying and contorting a family tied by love, debts, humor, and ghosts. Tran has turned the question of what a family can be into a complex, heartfelt mural of possibility.” –Bryan Washington, author of Memorial and Lot

A captivating debut novel that moves backwards in time to trace five generations of Vietnamese mothers and daughters, drawing on Vietnamese zodiac astrology to chart the fateful events of their lives

What does the future hold for those born in the years of the Dragon, Tiger, and Goat?

In present day New Orleans, Xuan Trung, former beauty queen turned refugee after the Fall of Saigon, is obsessed with divining her daughters' fates through their Vietnamese zodiac signs. But Trac, Nhi and Trieu diverge completely from their immigrant parents' expectations. Successful lawyer Trac hides her sexuality from her family; Nhi competes as the only woman of color on a Bachelor-esque reality TV show; and Trieu, a budding writer, is determined to learn more about her familial and cultural past.

As the three sisters begin to encounter strange glimpses of long-buried secrets from the ancestors they never knew, the story of the Trung women unfurls to reveal the dramatic events that brought them to America. Moving backwards in time, E.M. Tran takes us into the high school classrooms of New Orleans, to Saigon beauty pageants, to twentieth century rubber plantations, traversing a century as the Trungs are both estranged and united by the ghosts of their tumultuous history.

A “haunted story of resilience and survival” (Meng Jin, Little Gods), Daughters of the New Year is an addictive, high-wire act of storytelling that illuminates an entire lineage of extraordinary women fighting to reclaim the power they’ve been stripped of for centuries.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

Vietnamese in America

When a country is torn apart and then reassembled more than just lives are lost. And the survivors…. Their histories, cultural norms, hopes and dreams also get shredded, and what comes after is something no one could have anticipated

Listening was hard to follow

As much as I wanted to love the story-it was hard to keep track of the different characters-I used the PDF and that helped somewhat but not speaking Vietnamese I had trouble hearing the names and immediately associating them with their character.

This being said the book has important information that I enjoyed learning and I’m glad I read it.

Too short

Seemed like it ended way too soon. The characters felt unresolved. Where is the test?