Summer Reading at the O! featuring E.M. Tran's Daughter of the New Year

A lively, spellbinding tale about the extraordinary women within a Vietnamese immigrant family—and the ancient zodiac legend that binds them together

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 sisters each begin to encounter long-buried secrets from their ancestors, the story of the Trung women unfurls to reveal the dramatic events that brought them to America.

Moving backward 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.

Qian Julie Wang for The New York Times shares, “By connecting these contemporary challenges with the Trungs’ warrior lineage, Tran shows us that modern resistance to assimilation is a continuation of a historical fight against imperialism. When a boy in school racially taunts Trac, an ancestor appears by her side, telling Trac, “You will not disappear” — a reminder that she will resist obliteration just like all the women before her.”

learn more about daughters of the new year Read The New York Times Review of the Book