“He’s polish without substance, and I’ve hitched my wagon to nothing but a handful of glitter.”
“The living must trespass on the dead; everything left behind a gift, an inheritance, no matter how unintentional.”
Thao Thai’s debut Banyan Moon (Mariner Books 2023) is a heart hug of a family saga. From the 1960s Vietnam to present day swamplands of Florida, the novel gives us three strong-willed and fiercely independent women – Minh, her daughter Hurong, and Hurong’s daughter, Ann. Their love for each other is barbed, stinging themselves and those who dare get too close, but they are furiously loyal even if uncertain on how to hold each other without it hurting. The novel is a raw look at the hardships and realities of motherhood – the disconnection and attempts to reconnect – the generational trauma carried like whispered secrets in their blood.
Ann’s picture-perfect world far away from the chaos of her childhood home has started to tarnish, and she is faced with choices that will impact not only her, but her unborn child. With those choices still lingering, she receives the call that her beloved grandmother has died. The death and her grief allow her to hit pause on her relationship with Noah and the pregnancy – she goes home.
Hurong has always been jealous of Minh’s relationship with Ann. Ann received the best parts of Minh, and Minh received Ann’s love and loyalty; Hurong always felt like an outsider. But now Minh’s gone, and whatever glue she may have used to hold Hurong and Ann together, however fragile it was, is now gone. As adults, can they mend a decades old hurt?
Minh floats in and out of the novel, as an imposing grandmother, a shy teenager in love, a fierce woman who will do what it takes to get her children passage to America, an angry mother, keeper of secrets, a ghost trying to mend an inherited hurt.
While reading, I found myself reminded repeatedly of Alice Hoffman’s Practical Magical – the comparison gave the novel a familiar scent, but the taste was salt on citrus. A more recent comparison would be The Fortunes of Jaded Women, but where that novelfailed, Banyan Moon, with its similar themes, soared.
Read this novel.
A Girl Named Tommi 