to be read... comments later!

Lê Thi Diem Thuy's short novel The Gangster We are all Looking For was a quick read. It purports to be a novel but certainly has the feel of a biography/memoir given what little we know about the author from the cover. In it, a young girl recounts her family saga, her father and she escaping by boat from Vietnam after the war and ending up resettled in southern California. Her mother is temporarily left behind but joins them later. The story moves forward more by suggestion than actual straightforward storytelling. Our young girl is the narrator in most of the book, but we learn that she ran away later to the East Coast. And there is the brother back in Vietnam, forever... most of the book seems to gather around the enormous sadness of the father: "Between us now there hangs the familiar smoke of small rooms crowded with people larger than their situation. People who, feeling they have no recourse to change the circumstances of their lives, fold down, crumble inhttps://www.goodreads.com/review/list/32568806to their own shadows. This is what I saw my father do. He made himself small, so that in the world there was very little left of him, even while within me his hunger grew. It became expansive, billowing like an abandoned parachute searching the sky for the man who has fallen."

I have chosen this book from iwillrejoice's ABC Authors Book Rings - US version - Letter T. Thanks for sharing!

Quick, interesting read.

This book will be passed on to retc tomorrow.