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    Pioneer Girl
    Unavailable
    Pioneer Girl
    Unavailable
    Pioneer Girl
    Audiobook7 hours

    Pioneer Girl

    Written by Bich Minh Nguyen

    Narrated by Bernadette Dunne

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDreamscape Media Audio
    Release dateFeb 18, 2014
    ISBN9781629234328
    Unavailable
    Pioneer Girl
    Author

    Bich Minh Nguyen

    Bich Minh Nguyen teaches literature and creative writing at Purdue University. She lives with her husband, the novelist Porter Shreve, in West Lafayette, Indiana and Chicago.

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    Reviews for Pioneer Girl

    4/5

    4 ratings3 reviews

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    • 3/5
      An interesting look at second generation immigrants from Viet Nam. Lee Lien was always looking for home, her mother and grandfather ran Chinese buffets alternately owning their own strip mall Chinese restaurants. They went from one place in the Midwest to another and Lee and her brother Sam disdained their way of life.Lee, after a story her grandfather told about Rose Wilder Lane and a piece of jewelry she left in their place of business in Vietnam, starts piecing together the life of Laura and Rose. I never read the LIttle House on the prairie books but I found her research and the many paths and places this took her, to be fascinating. All set to give this four stars but than when she meets Gregory something happens that I found predictable and stereotypical, did not feel it was at all necessary to the story and the aftermath included some awkward dialogue. So for me this derailed the storing bit. Still it is an very good piece of work and the revelations and discussion about these literary icons were fascinating.The book does make me want to read The LIttle House on the Prairie books. Very easy to read, flows right along, a good blending of the immigrant experience, family and research.
    • 4/5
      Somewhat unusual but insightful look at race, class, and gender in America. Thought it was interesting the way the author blended together fiction and history.
    • 5/5
      If this intriguing layered novel only told the family focused story of Lee Lien, a book-nerdy young woman with an on-hold academic career trying to straddle the contrasting cultures and conflicting expectations of modern America, where she was born, and traditional pre-war Vietnam, where her strong-willed mother and gracious grandfather spent the earlier parts of their lives, that would have been enough to capture my interest. If instead Pioneer Girl was simply a literary mystery, with Lee Lien so obsessed by a book related incident that may connect her family’s former Saigon restaurant to the author(s) of the Little House on the Prairie series that she chases clues across the country, from dusty library shelves to colorfully painted San Francisco neighborhoods, even abandoning her normally somewhat passive upright nature long enough to slip archival materials into her handbag, I’d make sure to get my hands on a copy. But Pioneer Girl is both books, and talk about obsessed, I couldn’t put it down. This isn’t the kind of mystery with dead bodies or definite answers, but that just made this coming of age quest all the more intriguing.