Recently I gave birth to my son Joel six weeks early during a pandemic where I was not allowed any support people in the room. This is to say that the opening to Thi Bui's enchanting memoir struck a deep cord as I lay in the cold hospital room while my son was in the NICU & I understood intimately the anxieties of being a new mom. The stories, characters and places in this memoir are absolutely mesmerizing and I could not stop reading! In the wee hours of the night, just after breastfeeding, I reached the devastating plot twist & started bawling. It's not just the simplicity of the prose or the complexity of Bui's reckoning with her homeland, but also the emotional pull of immigrant families that make this book resonate. My only complaint is that the font is a bit hard to read at times, but that could be the way the book renders on an eReader!