- This is an extraordinarily good novel by Australian author Tracey Lien. It has just been awarded the 2023 Readings Prize for fiction. It's a superbly wrought immigrant Vietnamese family drama, set in the outer Western suburb of Cabramatta in Sydney. It starts simply, with a slight YA tone, but builds gradually into a rich and complex story of Western/Asian cultural contrasts, mother/daughter tensions, the power of Asian parents and the obligations the children are made to feel. It becomes a very earthy, gritty and real, narrative.
- Lien has the ability to delve deeply into the lives of each of her characters, as she does for the whole suburb of Cabramatta. They are brought vividly to life. Cabramatta proved that a town could be gorgeous and sick, comforting and dangerous, imperfect but home.
- Her focus is on a Vietnamese family living in Cabramatta. The parents, who barely speak English, escaped Communist rule in Vietnam after the war and managed to get to Australia. The mother at first seems a nasty piece of work, and she's a superstitious Buddhist adherent. But as is slowly revealed there's a lot more to her than that. Her daughter Ky (pronounced 'Key') is an excellent, top of the class school student, who finds her parents frustrating and unlovable. Her school friend Minnie is a cherished soulmate, a bright spunky delight, and she becomes the key player in the unfolding drama that takes place five years later.
- The central element in the story is that Denny, Ky's academically brilliant younger brother, has been murdered. Was he caught up in the ugly drug gang warfare in Cabramatta? Ky is desperate to find out. So we're sucked into a personal investigation and ugly details emerge - of relationships, families, abuse and neglect.
- But there is also love. And a very satisfying resolution.
- In today's ugly world it's good to be reminded of that.
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