Synopses & Reviews
A luminous fiction debut: the tumultuous history of modern Vietnam as experienced by a young girl born under mysterious circumstances a few years before reunification — and with the otherworldly ability to hear the voices of the dead.
At the peak of the war in Vietnam, a baby girl is born on the night of the full moon along the Song Ma River. This is Rabbit, who will journey away from her destroyed village with a makeshift family thrown together by war. Here is a Vietnam we've never encountered before: through Rabbit's inexplicable but radiant intuition, we are privy to an intimate version of history, from the days of French Indochina and the World War II rubber plantations through the chaos of postwar reunification. With its use of magical realism — Rabbit's ability to "hear" the dead — the novel reconstructs a turbulent historical period through a painterly human lens. This is the moving story of one woman's struggle to unearth the true history of Vietnam while simultaneously carving out a place for herself within it.
Review
“Blurring boundaries between history and invention, life and death....award-winning poet Barry’s first novel is fierce, stunning, and devastating. Readers haunted by...Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life, and Tan Twan Eng’s The Gift of Rain will revel in it.” Library Journal, starred review
Review
“Barry’s fiction debut weaves a chronicle of life in pre- and postwar Vietnam within the mystical and turbulent journey of the novel’s protagonist, Rabbit…[whose] tale is deepened by her unique ability to hear the voices of the dead. From these voices emerges a rich tapestry of stories… Barry’s rich narrative entwines one personal tale with an evocative and haunting exploration of Vietnam’s painful past.” Booklist
Review
“Quan Barry’s She Weeps Each Time You’re Born is lyrical, luminous, and suspenseful all at once. Rabbit’s experience of wartime and reconciliation in Vietnam is one that I haven’t yet encountered in fiction, and it is rendered with shocking clarity and pathos on the page. Like Rabbit’s Goddess of Mercy, who has many manifestations, this is a Vietnam of myriad faces, myriad aspects, beautiful and terrible all at once.” Jesmyn Ward, National Book Award-winning author of Salvage the Bones
About the Author
Born in Saigon and raised on Boston's north shore, Quan Barry is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of four poetry books; her third book, Water Puppets, won the AWP Donald Hall Poetry Prize and was a PEN/Open Book finalist. She has received two NEA Fellowships in both fiction and poetry, and her work has appeared in such journals as The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, Ms., and The New Yorker. Barry lives in Wisconsin.