A powerful and wholly original American saga. "San Francisco Chronicle"
Bich Minh Nguyen s previous books the acclaimed memoir "Stealing Buddha s Dinner "and the American Book Award winning novel "Short Girls" established her talents as a writer of keen cultural observation. In "Pioneer Girl," Nguyen entwines the Asian American experience with the escapist pleasures of literature, in a dazzling mystery about the origins of Laura Ingalls Wilder s classic "Little House on the Prairie."
Lee Lien has long dodged her Vietnamese family s rigid expectations by immersing herself in books. But now, jobless with a PhD in literature, she is back at home, working in her family s restaurant under her mother s hypercritical gaze until an heirloom from their past sends Lee on a search for clues that may lead back to Wilder herself, transforming strangers lives as well as her own."