Book Blurb:
When Ann Tran gets the call that her fiercely beloved grandmother, Minh, has passed away, her life is already at a crossroads. In the years since she’s last seen Minh, Ann has built a seemingly perfect life—a beautiful lake house, a charming professor boyfriend, and invites to elegant parties that bubble over with champagne and good taste—but it all crumbles with one positive pregnancy test. With both her relationship and carefully planned future now in question, Ann returns home to Florida to face her estranged mother, Huơng.
Back in Florida, Huơng is simultaneously mourning her mother and resenting her for having the relationship with Ann that she never did. Then Ann and Huơng learn that Minh has left them both the Banyan House, the crumbling old manor that was Ann’s childhood home, in all its strange, Gothic glory. Under the same roof for the first time in years, mother and daughter must face the simmering questions of their past and their uncertain futures, while trying to rebuild their relationship without the one person who’s always held them together.
My Review: 4.25 stars
Banyan Moon by Thao Thai is an engrossing book about mothers and daughters – how we love them and how we hurt them. The writing is this novel was seriously stunning, with some lines that were pure poetry.
With three generations telling this story, it gives the reader an insider’s look into each of their perspectives on the same issues. These characters came across as puzzle pieces from the same puzzle, all trying to find their fit safely with one another. As the three women navigate with and around each other, even in death – secrets are unleashed, bad blood between siblings come to a head, class differences are highlighted and inherited family traumas are examined.
The house, affectionally called Banyon House, plays its own role as a character that shelters these women until it can’t. There is lots to discuss in this book and I’m certain book clubs will love it.
Quotes I liked:
Then I think: Maybe that’s the root of all my problems. With men, with life. I’m always asking what they see in me, and never considering what I see in myself.”
“I wonder if you can inherit evil.”
“Everything feels half written. Like a storybook with invisible ink. It disappears before I figure out what I want the future to look like.
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