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Staff Pick
Real Americans is a novel about people doing their best for the people they love, the vast spectrum of what that can mean, and how anyone lives with the impossible choices they make in pursuit of that noble goal. This is also a novel about what makes a person who they are — their experiences, genetics, community, environment, place in history, inheritances, and decisions. It's unexpected and beautiful and heartbreaking, and I will think about this book for my entire life. Recommended By Michelle C., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
From the award-winning author of Goodbye, Vitamin How far would you go to shape your own destiny? An exhilarating novel of American identity that spans three generations in one family, and asks: What makes us who we are? And how inevitable are our futures?
Real Americans begins on the precipice of Y2K in New York City, when twenty-two-year-old Lily Chen, an unpaid intern at a slick media company, meets Matthew. Matthew is everything Lily is not: easygoing and effortlessly attractive, a native East Coaster and, most notably, heir to a vast pharmaceutical empire. Lily couldn't be more different: flat-broke, raised in Tampa, the only child of scientists who fled Mao's Cultural Revolution. Despite all this, Lily and Matthew fall in love.
In 2021, fifteen-year-old Nick Chen has never felt like he belonged on the isolated Washington island where he lives with his single mother, Lily. He can't shake the sense she's hiding something. When Nick sets out to find his biological father, the journey threatens to raise more questions than answers.
In immersive, moving prose, Rachel Khong weaves a profound tale of class and striving, race and visibility, and family and inheritance — a story of trust, forgiveness, and finally coming home.
Exuberant and explosive, Real Americans is a social novel par excellence that asks: Are we destined, or made, and if so, who gets to do the making? Can our genetic past be overcome?
Review
"Aglow with love in its many forms, suffused with questions of where — and to whom — we belong, Real Americans is a book of rare charm. Khong untangles the roots of family with a wry, tender attention that will leave readers as comforted as they are challenged." C. Pam Zhang, author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold and Land of Milk and Honey
Review
"A sweeping exploration of choice, chance, class, race, and genetic engineering in three generations of a Chinese American family….Bold, thoughtful, and delicate at once, addressing life's biggest questions through artfully crafted scenes and characters." Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
Review
"[Real Americans is a] plot-rich, spiraling, multigenerational epic [that] possesses the same heartrending humanity and deceptively subtle portrayal of characters' unseen depths [as Rachel Khong's debut] — so impossible to relate, so essential to everything." Booklist
About the Author
Rachel Khong is the author of Goodbye, Vitamin, winner of the California Book Award for First Fiction and named a Best Book of the Year by NPR; O, The Oprah Magazine; Vogue; and Esquire. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Cut, The Guardian, The Paris Review, and Tin House. In 2018, she founded The Ruby, a work and event space for women and nonbinary writers and artists in San Francisco's Mission District. She lives in California.