I really identified with Van, the older, studious sister, in this book about culture, identity, family, and love.

( )

(8.5)I found this book engaging and refreshing in its depiction of two American born sisters of Vietnamese immigrant parents. There parents sort out other families from Vietnam as they struggled to assimilate and be accepted into american society. There mother Thuong was hardworking and saved a deposit for their first home, their father an engineer found work in brick and tile laying, but dreamed of becoming wealthy through his inventions and devoted much of his time to this.
The two daughters Van and Linny likewise differed in their approach to life. Van, the older, strove and succeeded in her school work, studying to be a lawyer specialising in immigration. Whereas, Van wanting to be accepted by her classmates, lived for her social life and experienced a succession of dead end jobs and relationships. Van marries another law student but cracks soon appear in their relationship. Both are called home when their father finally takes the oath for American citizenship and enters a reality television competition, there mother having died suddenly some years earlier.
The author demonstrates compassion and humour as she portrays the differing perspectives of these first and second generation immigrants struggling to assimilate into a different society. ( )

Van and Linny are sisters whose parents have immigrated from Vietnam to Michigan. The novel alternates between the stories of the two sisters. Both have relationship issues of different sorts and problems that might show up in any novel. Within the plot, however, is a theme about acceptance and what it means to be American, along with the theme of family relationships. While I enjoyed the novel, I did find it tedious after a while. I was hoping for more introspection about being the children of immigrants, but that often got buried into mundane wanderings about the men in the sisters' lives. Perhaps it was just me, but I also sometimes had problems keeping the chronology in order; especially in the beginning, the time frames switched frequently and with little warning. ( )

For immigration lawyer Van, life takes a spin after her husband announces unceremoniously, “I don’t want to live with you anymore.” She’s spent a long time feeling settled, comfortable and, in her words, “chosen” by Miles Oh, a successful, charismatic and handsome Asian-American who exudes a confidence and poise that Van herself has never felt. Losing him, as she does on page one, is like losing a limb.

Off in Chicago, Van’s younger sister Linny Luong has troubles of her own — namely the clandestine affair she’s conducting with Gary, a paunchy married man, and the unfulfilling job she holds at You Did It Dinners, a firm that requires her to cook copious amounts of food for other people’s families. At 27 and without a college degree, Linny struggles to find a purpose: something that would pull her up from the muck and introduce her to new experiences, a new life.

Though close in age and raised in the same household, Van and Linny remain estranged as adults — tied only to their aging father, a man caught up in his inventions for short people. Dinh and Thuy Luong arrived from Vietnam in the 1970s, settling in Michigan and raising their daughters to believe they’d have to work hard to excel in America — a land of opportunity . . . and very tall people. All small of stature, the Luongs had to set themselves apart to avoid being overlooked in a land where everyone literally towered over them.

Dinh has only become more obsessed with his work since his wife’s death nine years prior. Once just a hobby, the Luong Arm — and other products of Luong Inventions — have consumed all of their father’s attention. When the sisters are called back to Wrightville, Mich., for their father’s naturalization ceremony, they must finally confront the feelings they have for one another — and their strained upbringing — all while dealing with their own crumbling relationships.

Bich Minh Nguyen’s Short Girls is an interesting, perceptive look at life for the daughters of two immigrants. While Linny bucked against their traditional Vietnamese upbringing, wearing colorful clothing, making many friends and acting “like a white girl,” Van folded in on herself — studying constantly; applying to law school; blending in as best she could in small-town Michigan. The juxtaposition of the two girls was fascinating, and I loved that neither was a complete cliche.

Though I enjoyed the characters and the fact that most defied stereotypes, the novel’s strength lies in the way it conveys the immigrant experience — both for the Luongs, who arrived decades before, and present-day immigrants in a post-9/11 world. As an immigration lawyer, Van works tirelessly as an advocate for the frightened people who arrived in the U.S. without friends or family, looking timidly at locals who bark at them to “speak English.” I’ve always considered myself an open-minded and tolerant person, and reading about the way some of Van’s clients had been treated was painful. I can only imagine how terrifying it would be to be dropped in a foreign country with only a dream of a better life — and no idea how to actually make it happen.

Short Girls is not an action-packed or fluid story -- but somehow, it still worked for me. My heart caught as Van came to grips with her impending divorce; I wanted to reach out and help Linny in the kitchen, where she worked to prepare traditional Vietnamese meals for her thankless father. Even Mr. Luong was somehow endearing, despite the fact that he withheld approval for his daughters. By the close of the book, I cared about these people. And though not much happens or is accomplished in Short Girls, that’s still what I ask for in a book.

Fans of literary fiction who enjoy stories on family dynamics, sisters or the immigrant experience might enjoy this one. Though it didn’t move me to tears or provoke any action on my part, I enjoyed Van and Linny’s story — and the positive, uplifting note on which the book closes. ( )

Short Girls is an OK book and a somewhat entertaining read, but it's a pretty stereotypical children of immigrants story without any edge that gives it texture or depth -- definitely not Amy Tan or Junot Diaz. Van and Linny are two estranged sisters, daughters of Vietnamese immigrants, who are brought together in the course of the book by difficulties in their romantic relationships. Van, the older, achieving, lawyer sister is deserted by her husband Miles, a 4th-generation Chinese-American lawyer, who is far more sophisticated than she. Linny, the somewhat rebellious younger daughter, finds herself in an affair with a married man. When they go home for their father's citizenship celebration, they begin to confide in one another. We learn nothing about the parents' lives in Vietnam, very little about the Vietnamese community in the Midwest (both girls escape from it as fast as they can), and the characters seem more soap-opera-ish than compelling. Honestly, I was quite disappointed -- I was hoping for some insight into this community. For that, I would recommend Andrew Pham's Catfish and Mandala. This is a pretty run-of-the-mill story of American middle class 20-somethings. ( )

I really enjoyed the sisters who are the short girls, Linny and Van. The author paints a defined picture of each as she struggles with upheaval in her life. They are very different and Nguyen explores how they diverged as they were growing up, the daughters of Vietnamese immigrants in Michigan and how that experience affected each sister very differently. They now live away from their hometown where their father, a widower remains. He is about to become a citizen and they return home for the celebration. I loved the depiction of the father who has invented, among other things, the Luong arm which is a necessity for a short person. The ending was weak which was a dissapointment. ( )

Bich Minh Nguyen's Short Girls is a story of Vietnamese, second-generation immigrants Linny and Van Luong and their family. Their father, a loner and inventor, holding them at arms length, and their familial history is obscured by stories and silence. The story is broken into alternating chapters about each young woman, though written in a point of view that is more like an observer, though each woman's inner thoughts are revealed.

"The Luongs had always done this, scratching at each other's words as much out of habit as anything. But this time when Thuy Luong had told her husband to go sleep in the basement "like a dog"he stayed there instead of slinking back upstairs." (Page 4 of ARC)

Van is an immigration lawyer with the "perfect" life, or at least that's how it seems to her sister, Linny. Linny, on the other hand, has a free life where she can act and do as she desires on a whim without responsibility -- at least that's how it seems to her sister. The tension between these sisters is vivid, but in many ways could have been better executed without the internal dialogue complaints about the other sister at every turn or before each memory surfaced to demonstrate their differences.

"She would have set the glass to shattering, sailed through someone else's house, used up all the space that humans never reached." (Page 53 of ARC)

Van's world has been falling apart slowly, and now she is set adrift without a compass and without a husband. She struggles to keep her drama to herself and to overcome the emptiness in her home and her life. Meanwhile, Linny has to come to grips with her errors and her drifting life to make her dreams come true, while at the same time support her sister and her father, who continues to struggle to find success.

"Linny put in long hours experimenting shadows and liners, trying to make her eyes look bigger, deeper-set, less Asian. She painted plum colors up to her eyebrows and applied three coats of mascara. She ran peroxide-soaked cotton balls through her hair to create caramel highlights." (Page 58 of ARC)

Nguyen's Short Girls is a look at racial discrimination, immigrants looking for their place in a society that welcomes and shuns them, and finding once self amid the melting pot and one's own family, while trying to accept your family's own faults and ideas about success and love. ( )

A good while back, I reviewed "Free Food for Millionaires" by Min Jin Lee, a book which explored the experiences of a first generation Korean American. I was struck by the parallels between that book and this debut novel from Bich Minh Nguyen. Granted, the former focuses on Korean immigrants and the latter on Vietnamese, but both novels are rich with the struggle of American-born children of immigrants.

This novel centres on two sisters, Van and Linh Luong. Van is the elder daughter, an immigration lawyer, serious and with a marriage in difficulty. Linny is the younger, carefree, working as a cook, and trying to end an affair with a married man. Both sisters are dealing with crises but keep their distance from the other.

At the centre of their lives is their widowed father. He has been obsessed with the short stature of Vietnamese people his whole life and uses all his inventive mind to create the Luong Arm, a device to help shorter people reach items on top shelves. In order to futher his inventions, he decides to become a naturalised citizen of the U.S. and enter a reality TV show for inventors.

It is while begrudgingly attending to their father that the two sisters realise that they are both at crossroads in their lives. Drawing on each other in way that they haven't done since childhood, they find the strength to start living new lives.

Nguyen has written a simple novel that somehow captures the readers' interest. The two sisters are real characters who will resonate with a lot of female readers. The author switches deftly between the present and the past to tell this tale, but maybe the characters realness is their failing, as somehow this novel fails to linger to any great degree. ( )

As another reviewer said, there's not a lot of action in this book, but there doesn't need to be. Nguyen paints rich pictures with words; her descriptions are a joy to read and her characters and dialogue believable. I definitely enjoyed this book, and look forward to reading more by Nguyen. ( )

Van and Linny Luong are complete opposites. Van is the over achiever who has been hurt really bad by Mr. Right walked out on her. Linny is the beautiful socialite who gets humiliated when her affair with a married man turns nasty. Both sister don't get along with each other and would never call the other for advice. When their father calls them home to celebrate his finally becoming an American Citizen, both girls find themselves finally communicating with each about their deceased mother, their past, and their romantic troubles. Getting a chance to see things through the other's point of view, the rift between them starts to heal, but will the two ever be able to put their differences aside and see eye to eye or will their fragil relationship take a turn for the worst when certain family secrets start coming out? A heartwarming, at times funny, book about two sisters with an interesting twist on a classic case of sibling rivalry. Although some of the issues about immigration and citizenship are never quite fully resolved, this story opens a world to the readers that has never been seen in quite this way. Readers will find that they can relate to at least a few of the characters in this book and will be slightly changed and maybe even edified by the story Bich Mich Nguyen tells in this book. ( )

Short Girls is a quick but engrossing read. This book, about two second generation Vietnamese American sisters, tells the story of their coming to know themselves and realize the value of family and tradition. The sisters, though distant and on diverging paths in life, are brought together through both crisis and celebration, both in their personal and professional lives.

Whether or not you identify with Van, the lawyer whose even temper and drive to achieve doesn't suffice to hide her fragility, or her capricious and irresponsible sister Linny, you will find the characters well developed and quite likable. Much of the story revolves around the girls sense of obligation to their widower father, and stories of his obsession with height, or really the families lack of it. Current dealings with him, the inner and outer conflicts they create, and memories of their deceased mother set much of the emotional tone. The novel does end on a hopeful note and is another in the genre of asian american fiction or quasi-memoir that I would recommend. ( )

Though this book didn't have a whole lot of action or a whole lot going on even, it was really good at keeping my attention and keeping me interested. The book is very well written. ( )

Van and Linny Luong are sisters who were born in America to Vietnamese immigrants. Their mother has died, and though they both feel strong ties to their hapless but domineering father, they don’t like to spend time with him. The sisters are estranged from each other as they have very little in common. This story is about family ties and how these sisters reconnect.

The story is interesting, especially the insight into Vietnamese culture, and what it is like to be an immigrant. Van is a lawyer who specializes in immigration law and this point of view was insightful.

I expected more humor from this book. The title and the cover make it sound like it will be lighthearted, something it definitely was not. It was actually depressing in parts because Van is going through a painful divorce and Linny is dating a married man.
The story did end on an uplifting note as the sisters learn to appreciate each other and their heritage. ( )

First I'd like to say that even though the label "Chick Lit" will be put on this book, I'd like to lose the label. Mostly because this book should be viewed as literature.

This is the immigrant's tale of many Americans. It is told from the alternating narrative of second generation American sisters, whose parents had came from Vietnam. Don't expect a hard hitting action story, but a strong book that works with well developed characters as they try to survive in post-9/11 America. ( )

"Short Girls" is a wonderful debut novel about two Vietnamese sisters and their father struggling in modern America. The oldest daughter Van escapes through overachieving: she works hard in law school, then in her career as a immigration lawyer, and in her marriage to a firmly implanted Chinese American man who happens to be a perfectionist. Younger sister Linny, the rebel, is her opposite: she relies on her beauty and her sense of fashion to eventually land a job in a catering company, only to jeopardize that job by having an affair with the husband of one of her clients.

This novel is about discovering ones sense of self in an "alien" land, and is reflected in the title "Short Girls." In a country that seems to be mostly tall people, their father, Mr. Luong constantly reminds his children that they are short people growing up in a world designed for those taller than themselves and that they have to work harder than other people to overcome the world's bias.

Stylistically, Nguyen seems to have a wonderful command of language and is able to pack a lot of emotion into her tight prose. Alternating between the point-of-view of each sister, the reader is able to follow each character as she sorts out her recently troubled life and the author does a wonderful job of firmly establishing each character's unique voice. And while the plot itself is nothing exciting, the story is well worth the time. ( )

This is first and foremost a story about two sisters and their (developing a) relationship, and second a story about immigration and assimilation. Nguyen manages to reveal the sisters' past without writing a lumbering exposition, and their experiences growing up are woven into the overall narrative without being intrusive. The description of their developing relationship and better understanding of each other is what makes this a particularly good story - the two have such different personalities that it seems like they would never have anything in common, but Nguyen makes the transition not only believable, but plausible and even probable. There is much talk about the agonies of being short, and I think those parts could have been cut down quite a bit. It is a fast, sometimes sad, sometimes funny read - Nguyen's writing is very readable and she seems a natural story-teller. I must admit I chuckled knowingly once or twice at the descriptions of Vietnamese culture; my best friend's husband is Vietnamese, and some of the things Nguyen describes (food, social interaction, etc.) struck me as very true indeed! ( )

The Review

From the author of Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, comes a novel about two Vietnamese sisters who are U.S. Citizens born of immigrant parents. The girls, have gone in completely different directions with their lives. Their relationship is strained and it is seemingly difficult, at best, for them to connect in a loving and real way. The girls have lost their mother, however their father is an inventor who eventually gains his U.S. citizenship. Van, the older sister, struggles to express herself when it comes to her personal life and interpersonal relationships. Despite this, she has found success as an attorney. Linny is experiencing the opposite scenario in a floundering career and incomplete education. She never married and is involved in a relationship with a married man. Their father lives alone in their family home working on his inventions _targeted to aid short people.

In reading this overall story, I compliment Nguyen on her clean, concise writing ability She is most certainly a talented and promising writer. She provides a well described story of an immigrant’s family life in the United States. This includes the influence of American culture on their genetic/historic one… how they blend together and yet contradict one another. She also provides insight into the prejudices that naturalized citizens and the children they have given birth to in the United States.

I tended to gravitate towards Van’s story within the novel. I felt most compelled by her disintegrating marriage and the way that her estranged husband treated her. The story lines of her sister and father held little, if any interest for me. I felt contempt for Linny as she continued her affair with a married man and living aimlessly. I held compassion and pity for their father who was trapped within his own little world.

On Sher’s “Out of Ten Scale:”
Despite this writer’s obvious talent and penchant for writing, this story just didn’t hold my attention to the degree that I would have liked it to. This novel hosts a solid story of one family’s legacy in America. However, it just didn’t grab me and hold my attention the entire way through. With that being said, Nguyen shall get my rating, genre: Fiction:General, of 7 OUT OF 10. This book may maintain more of an impact for those who can better relate to the influence of their family’s immigration to the United States. ( )

Short Girls is Bich Minh Nguyen’s second book and her first foray into fiction. As a first book, it holds up well, although falls short of being truly memorable. The book tells the story of two very different Vietnamese-American sisters, Van and Linny, who at the beginning face similar conundrums, including professional and romantic crises. The following story has their attempts to define themselves at its heart.

I wish I’d been able to review this earlier in the summer, as I think it would make a fantastic beach read. Yes, there is a whiff of chick-lit here but the issues tackled aren’t often found in that genre. Immigration policy and cultural assimilation enter into the picture, as do inter-ethnic relationships. Nguyen’s great strength is to place these mostly in the background and bring them to the fore only when required by the plot.

The worst I can say about this book is that it is too small in its ambitions. Nguyen is a good writer, and I wish she had flexed her writing muscles a bit more. Still, this is a charming book that, while not throwing many surprises at the reader, is an entertaining read.

Van Luong Oh and her younger sister Linny are young Vietnamese–American women living in Michigan and Illinois. Their father, Dinh Luong who came to America in 1975 with his pregnant wife, has never quite fully adjusted to his life in the US. He’s on his own, a widower for some years, and works sporadically as a part-time tile layer. The rest of the time Dinh works on his inventions for short people. The Luong Arm helps you reach things that are high up, the Luong Eye helps you see over the crowd and his latest invention – the Luong shelf – a shelf that moves up and down on the wall so that a short person can reach what they need.

Van’s husband, Miles Oh, fourth generation Chinese has just left her. They met in law school, courted briefly and married. They seem to have achieved a perfect life together, but in reality they were never truly happy with one another even though Van does not realize it until well after Miles’ desertion. She is an immigration lawyer in Detroit, a job she feels passionately about, but when she loses a big case – an impossible case – and her client is deported she loses focus. After that Van’s life comes unglued.

Linny, the younger sister, works for a catering company that specializes in making slightly up-scale frozen meals for the career women and housewives who can’t or won’t cook themselves. Never before has Linny worked for the same employer for so long a time. Up until then the jobs she held did not last for very long; she did not want to commit to anything even approaching a career. It is the same thing with the relationships in her life. They are many and they do not last. Even her current affair with a married man, a client she met through her job, cannot last and sure enough at the beginning of the story, Linny and Gary begin to come unraveled.

The story runs over the course of two months, involving itself with the sisters’ lives-in-flux and their difficult relationship with their father and the Vietnamese community they left behind when they left home.

This is not my kind of story. That said, I enjoyed it anyway. It held my interest and was compelling in certain places. I learned a lot about the complexities of immigration law and wonder how anything apparently so nonsensical can be said to be fair or to work. I would recommend it to anyone who has a taste for this kind of reconnecting-with-your-family, finding-out-who-you-really-are, novel. ( )

I have to confess that when I first started reading Short Girls, I thought it was just another examination of the inter-generational struggles faced by families recently immigrated to the United States. As this is a vein that has been mined so wonderfully by Amy Tan over the years, it was not clear that this novel—which concentrates on the Vietnamese rather than the Chinese experience—would be anything special.

Fortunately, I kept reading and I am glad that I did. While Bich Nguyen’s book certainly does consider the joys and strains of the relationships between parents and children caught between two cultures, her real focus is the interaction between the two sisters of the title. Conditioned from birth to both resent and embrace their status as “short girls”—a continuing metaphor for their standing as people who will always be at least slightly outside the mainstream— Linny and Van face their challenge and pursue their lives in very different ways. As a consequence, they grow apart and barely speak to one another after high school. Much of the action in the novel involves the sometimes heartbreaking sequence of events that ultimately bring them back together.

I enjoyed this book, largely because I really grew to care about both of the sisters. Nguyen—who seems to have written from personal experience—has drawn very distinct and authentic portraits of two women who view the world quite disparately, but share too much in the way of history and common genes to ever break apart completely. This is a book about love and loss, fitting in and being estranged, regret and redemption. I recommend it without hesitation. ( )

Short Girls is the story of two sisters, Van and Linny, and how they are each defined in some part by their Vietnamese heritage. The book contrasts the sisters - Van who is studious and determined versus Linny who is flirtatious and fashion conscious, they are the age old good girl/bad girl, except that the book is too good for the author to leave it there and they are both fleshed out with great detail. As the book alternates viewpoints between the sisters, we learn their stories and see their relationship evolve. There is also the contrast between their parents, first generation immigrants, and the daughters who were born in the States and are essentially American but can still feel like outsiders. Each parent has their own way of handling their immersion in America and the differences there provide some of the book's more lighthearted moments.

I enjoyed Short Girls. Once I started I didn't want to put it down because I wanted the whole story revealed. Nguyen writes with a very authentic sounding voice about the experience of being considered foreign in your own home; it made me curious about her as a person. I had all my questions answered at her website - http://www.bichminhnguyen.com/. The site's Q&A with Bich was interesting reading and now I am eager to get a look at her memoir, Stealing Buddha's Dinner. ( )

Short Girls tells the story of two second-generation Vietnamese sisters, Van and Linny. Coping with the aftermath of crumbling relationships with their husband and lover, they reunite at their father's citizenship party after being estranged from each other for several years. In the days that follow, they learn more than they ever knew about each other and themselves.

As a second-generation Asian myself, I feel that Nguyen has presented a realistic portrayal of what it is like to be caught between two cultures. The book is about "short" people living in an environment created by "tall" people. How do you manage in a world where you don't fit, where you have to struggle and reach to do the normal things everyone else takes for granted?

Nguyen has created an engaging story about two women with wildly contrasting personalities, who initially believe they have absolutely nothing in common. They discover that, despite their differences, they cannot escape their shared cultural history and it is that which ultimately brings them together. ( )