This is a well-handled and tautly told story, and Robert's devolution into his darkest self is rich all on its own. But the real underbelly here is the past that has haunted Suzy her whole life—a past rooted deeply in Communist Vietnam, which takes her first husband and home and, after the fall of Saigon, leaves her heart further ravaged by the difficult crossing of an unforgiving sea to a refugee camp in Malaysia. When she finally comes to America, she is unable to shake this past, these ghosts and this difficulty…The novel is uncompromising in its confrontations with the dark sides of all of its characters, but Tran treats them with a hard-won dignity, and in this way elevates the narrative away from the sentimental…Dragonfish is a strong first novel for its risk taking, for its collapsing of genre, for its elegant language and its mediation of a history that is integral to post-1960s American identity yet often ignored…Above all, Tran's novel is a refreshing and entertaining story.
The New York Times Book Review - Chris Abani
★ 06/08/2015
"Nuanced and elegiac…. Vu Tran takes a strikingly poetic and profoundly evocative approach to the conventions of crime fiction in this supple, sensitive, wrenching, and suspenseful tale of exile, loss, risk, violence, and the failure of love."
"Everything is perfect there, those quiet little garnishes of idiosyncratic detail are gifts, both amusing and full of character. Tran’s novel is filled with this sort of inspired meticulousness, and reading it is to enter its world."
"[R]ichly satisfying work…. A familiar noir trope—the missing woman—blooms darkly in Dragonfish as the story of a lost people, a theme that Tran renders exquisitely, rating the book a place on the top shelf of literary thrillers."
San Francisco Chronicle - Gerald Bartell
"[T]ransfixing…. [L]ike such writers as Caryl Phillips, Dinaw Mengestu and Edwidge Danticat, [Tran] is devoted to capturing the immigrant experience and widening everyone's understanding of its particular as well as universal truths."
Chicago Tribune - Lloyd Sachs
"A superb debut novel…that takes the noir basics and infuses them with the bitters of loss and isolation peculiar to the refugee and immigrant tale."
Fresh Air - Maureen Corrigan
"A sophisticated mystery anchored in one woman’s quest to make amends with the daughter she abandoned, Dragonfish delicately capsizes our notions of what it means to long for escape from the prisons of our own making."
★ 05/01/2015
★ 2015-05-21
"Absolutely gripping. Vu Tran has written a terrific—and deceptively weird—novel that manages to make Vietnam and Las Vegas feel like old, familiar friends. Don’t call him a writer to watch. Call him a writer to read."
"Like Gatsby, the characters in Tran’s novel yearn for something unattainable…This and the feeling that there will only be a tragic end are what elevate Dragonfish beyond its bookstore genre."
Los Angeles Review of Books
"Heartbreaking and haunting."
"Splendid…will quickly engage you with its suspenseful story of marital discord, told in duplicate, and set largely in Las Vegas…A dark and gripping story, Dragonfish will keep you reading, out of fear that if you stop, you will never truly surface."
Dallas Morning News - Anne Morris
"Well-handled and tautly told…[A] strong first novel for its risk taking, for its collapsing of genre, for its elegant language and its mediation of a history that is integral to post-1960s American identity yet often ignored."
"[A] hard-hitting debut novel…. [Suzy is] a mystery no one can solve, particularly the people turning all their efforts in the wrong direction. But while their efforts aren’t fruitful, they’re absorbing. And they speak to the way everyone is a bit of an enigma to other people, no matter how many words they put into the effort to be understood."
A superb debut novel…that takes the noir basics and infuses them with the bitters of loss and isolation peculiar to the refugee and immigrant tale.
Maureen Corrigan - NPR's Fresh Air
Well-handled and tautly told…[A] strong first novel for its risk taking, for its collapsing of genre, for its elegant language and its mediation of a history that is integral to post-1960s American identity yet often ignored.
Chris Abani - New York Times Book Review
Narrator Tom Taylorson's deep, sombre voice suits this gritty story, which wends from Las Vegas to Vietnam, then Malaysia, and back to the U.S. Robert Ruen is the standard jaded cop at the center of this noir. His past keeps coming back to haunt him. Suzy, his missing Vietnamese ex-wife, must be found, for her sake as well as his. Taylorson switches believably between the American main character and the supporting cast of Vietnamese hit men. His renditions of accented English add to the ambiance of non-native speakers, which is essential to these characters. Through his precise, insistent pace, the listener is drawn into the danger, shifting settings, and multicultural history at the heart of the story. M.R. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine
