Pioneer Girl

by Bich Minh Nguyen Narrated by Bernadette Dunne

Overview

Jobless with a PhD, Lee Lien returns home to her Chicago suburb from grad school, only to find herself contending with issues she's evaded since college. But when her brother disappears, he leaves behind an object from their mother's Vietnam past that stirs up a forgotten childhood dream: a gold-leaf brooch, abandoned by an American reporter in Saigon back in 1965, that might be an heirloom belonging to Laura Ingalls Wilder. As Lee explores the tenuous facts of this connection, she unearths more than expected - a trail of clues and enticements that lead her from the dusty stacks of library archives to hilarious prairie life reenactments and ultimately to San Francisco, where her findings will transform strangers' lives as well as her own.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Praise for Pioneer Girl:

“Elegant, sharp-eyed, and very funny, Pioneer Girl is ultimately about how one finds kinship—familial, cultural, literary—that transcends the usual lexicon about identity and belonging. Navigating Vietnamese ‘immigrant guilt’ and a stalled academic career, Lee Lien finds escape in trying to solve a literary mystery which leads her deep into her own heart and history. A wonderful read!”
—Cristina García, author of King of Cuba and Dreaming in Cuban 
 
“I love how the Little House legend takes a wild detour into contemporary life in Pioneer Girl. Bich Minh Nguyen’s wonderfully imagined literary history gets to the truth about mothers, daughters, frontiers, and the meaning of home. I couldn't put this down!” 
—Wendy McClure, author of The Wilder Life

JUNE 2014 - AudioFile

Narrator Bernadette Dunne delivers this first-person story featuring Lee Lien, a recent Ph.D. graduate in literature whose academic future is in limbo. The novel reads like a memoir, and Dunne’s straightforward delivery is a good match for its style. Lee comes across a pin of a little house, which was left in her grandfather’s cafe in Vietnam during the war by a journalist named Rose. Lee decides to try to discover if it is, indeed, the same pin Alonzo gave Laura in one of the Little House books. The author has cleverly interwoven the Ingalls’s pioneer experience with the fictional Lien family’s experiences finding a home in a new land, creating an interesting mix of fact, fiction, and supposition. Dunne’s no-frills delivery works well. N.E.M. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940175731294
Publisher:	Dreamscape Media
Publication date:	02/18/2014
Edition description:	Unabridged

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