The Best We Could Do is an ambitious, engaging, and emotional memoir which tackles the complex history of Vietnam and immigration through the story of Thi Bui’s family. At turns a record of the complicated history of Bui’s family coming to America and a look at the complex relationship of children to their immigrant parents, the overarching story is about the search for a better and stable future while still dreaming of the promise of the past.

Bookended by the birth of Bui’s first child, The Best We Could Do traces her awakened desire to better understand her parents’ history, and by extension, her own. Bui looks at the expanse of her families history, from her parents childhoods through their life in American, with an unflinching gaze that empathically illustrates the realities of her family’s life and history. Since Bui’s point of view is always used to filter these stories, the portrait that emerges is also a reflection on how a person’s life impacts their decisions as a parent. Through her journey we come to understand the hardships of not only immigration, but of the chaos of growing up and having a family in a war torn state.

Skillfully illustrated, the artwork in Best is evocative and emotive. By putting readers firmly in the middle of the action, it adds a deeper dimension to the stories than they might have alone. When Bui writes of her father’s childhood experience hiding from French forces attacking his village, the reader experiences his isolation and fear along with him. Situation after situation, both harrowing and joyful, are shared this way.

Simply put, The Best We Could Do is a must read. At a time in US history where people have grown to question immigration and the humanity of immigrants, this memoir should be put into everyone’s hands. What better way is there to understand the motivation behind people who choose to immigrate and the kind of situations they face both in their home country and once they arrive in the United States?

I hate saying a book about war, about refugees, about trauma, was a quick read. It's like saying: Show me the worst parts of your life and I'll be through it in an hour or less. Sometimes I think I need a life for each sad book I read, to do it justice.

The Best We Could Do is sad. Not overwhelmingly so, but it's definitely not unicorns smiling rainbows. In a sense, it's about disappointments, little, large, and in between. It's the story of Bui's parents, of Bui and her family fleeing Vietnam, of resettling in California, of Bui becoming a mother. But a book of disappointments can end up as nothing other than a disappointment. It's only a teeny one: by the time we're getting into the groove, into the feeling of these people's lives, the book ends. Just stops cold. And some of the themes that I wanted explored more (in particular how Bui becoming a mother affects her view of her parents) aren't. The Best We Could Do skims the surface when I want to go deep.

The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui went on sale March 7, 2017.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

This book was incredibly graphic and raw, but I felt it would have been expressed more fully in a different format other than a graphic novel. I struggled to connect with and follow the story, but understood what the author was attempting with this book. However, given that my opinion is not the only valid opinion out there, I shared this with followers on Instagram and Twitter because I know some of my followers would love it!

Graphic memoirs are quickly becoming a favorite genre for me. This beautifully drawn volume is one of the reasons why. Thi Bui tells her immigration story along with her family's backstory of a life in Vietnam during the last century and the civil war and it's resolution in that country. The story is not sugar coated, but tinged with an honest portrayal of how parents communicate (or don't) with their children. This memoir is personal and intimate, but manages to impart a great deal of history about Vietnam and it's history told from a point of view that is not American. That alone makes this a necessary and worthwhile read. But the element of this book that makes it an absolute must read for me is the author's telling each of her parent's stories separately. Illustrating as well as her artwork that we each have our own stories, even if they sometimes overlap with someone else's. Highly recommended.

I received an advanced copy of this book from the publisher via netgalley in exchange for an honest review. Thanks!

A beautiful narrative about what it means to be an immigrant, a refugee, a woman, a child and a mother.

This was a truly amazing graphic memoir. The illustrations are beautifully drawn and the story powerfully written. Bui's observations are keen and honest. This is a story about the narratives that can shape an identity - motherhood, family, the immigrant experience, and what it is to grow up to become who you are. Highly recommended.

"The best we could do" is a graphic memoir about a family forced to leave their country in order to get a better life, searching for a better future. It's a graphic novel that talks about the war in Vietnam but, most of all, this is a story about family. It talks about the difficulties they face before and after the displacement: all the sacrifices; the struggle of finding their own identity, or understanding the meaning of home; all the things parents teach to their children, even if they don't do it on purpose.

It's a touching and important story, and I strongly recommend it to everybody, because it doesn't matter that the war this graphic novel talks about happened many years ago, the main subjet of "The best we could do" is unfortunately up to date.

At the beginning, it was a bit difficult to get into the story because it jumps a lot from the present to the past, but it's easy to understand everything when you get used to the style. Furthermore, the artwork is great and I love the colour palette that Thi Bui chose.

Excerpt from Review: "...The Best We Could Do is an emotional rollercoaster ride, filled with ups and downs as Thi uncovers more of her family’s past. Though there is a little jumping around in the graphic novel, the story is easily followed and quite enlightening. A great read!"

The Best We Could Do An Illustrated Memoir is the first book by Thi Bui, the daughter of Vietnamese immigrants.

Abrams Book will publish this wonderful, touching and very sad at treats graphic novel next March 7th.

Of course this book will let us reflect.

Thi Bui writes: "Our family is a boat family", because exactly as it happens now in various parts of the world, her family afforded to the USA with a boat and exactly as it happens now with immigration, the family of Thi left Vietnam because of very difficult social conditions.

Social conditions that couldn't permit anymore to live in the country in which her family was born.

I admit that I didn't know all the political story of Vietnam and the book is also in this sense very interesting and sad because this graphic novel through the personal stories of the various members of Thi Bui will live parallelally also the political story of the country with all its wars and divisions during the decades .

Emigration: what is this word? And why a person or a family decides to leave his/her country for searching for something better in another place?

Surely it is not a choice that it is done with light heart, I can tell you that.Our land has been a land of emigration during the 1950s and it still is.

It means to re-start from the beginning in a place where maybe you need to learn everything, including a new language. There will be other people and these people maybe will live you with hostility or with at first with a certain diffidence.
You will bring new customs and traditions and at the same time you must respect the laws of the country where you decide to go for a new living.
It's a sufferance. A sufferance and an adventure. Plenty of optimism, but surely if you leave a world devastated by war as it happened at the family of Thi Bui, your problems will be many, your heart will be hardest and heaviest than not the one of an individual who just wanted to try to better the life, without having experienced the tribulations and horrors seen and lived by the family of Thi Bui.

The separation of a person from his own land a sufferance that will remain for the first generations of emigrated as explain also Thi Bui in a passage that we will see later because you decide to break your root and to re-start, but you know for sure that your country, the life-style, the lessons you have learned and who you are and why you are as you are will follow you.

There is a moment in the book I love a lot. Thi explains many family tends to accumulate objects while they tend to live in a minimalism way. Once, while she was still little, the family was arrived from a while in the USA, close to their house there was a fire and Thi Bui run upstairs for saving an envelope. Just in case...In this envelope the most important and precious documents of her family:the green cards, social security cards. Their being Americans.


In 2005 Thi Bui has had a son and she asks in the book: "Do we live on in what we leave to our children?" I think so.
Children are our extensions once we won't be anymore alive. Our mirror, our reflection.



Thi Bui asks in another passage at the end of the book: "How much of ME is my own, and how much is stamped into my blood and bone, predestined?"

The author thinks that being the children of parents who have seen the horror of war will always mean to feel in part the "weight of their past" although surely Thi Bui knows that she won't search anymore for another homeland because she is American and that Vietnam will always be genetically a part of her, but in a little little measure.
In the USA she has found the stability her parents were searching for them and their family.

Thi Bui is also worried for her son because she thinks maybe she can transmits him her sometimes pains and sufferance but when she looks at her son she sees a boy that is free.
Free to claim his future, free to become who wants to become, in a land of peace and in a land marked by that American Dream wanted so badly because real by all the immigrants who, for a reasons or another escaped from their lands, searching and dreaming for a better future and for peace and stability in the Land of Freedom and Opportunity.

Beautiful, truly moving, plenty of flashback, memories and intense. Highly recommended for understand and never forget the profound connection existing between past and present.





I thank NetGalley and ABRAMS Books for this book.

4.5 stars. An immersive, intimate, and beautiful graphic memoir. The book follows Thi's parents' childhoods and comings-of-age in Viet Nam, and then fleeing as refugees with their children to the US, interspersed with Thi's own experiences as a new mother and coming to terms with where her parents came from. The detailed and expressive artwork is a perfect complement to Thi's narrative voice. Wrenching, gorgeous, intensely personal, and strikingly engaging.

This was a very emotional, heart-wrenching but beautiful read. The illustrations worked worked beautifully with the story, and added so much to it. This is definitely a book I will recommend to many people.

The Best We Could Do continues the interesting and emotion-filled line of biographical comics that deal with leaving home countries, war, injustice and finding your own place and a better tomorrow. Thi Bui follows Satrapi and Kunwu and depicts us Vietnam, which we have never really known and not like this. It's her family's story to find a better life when Vietnam at that time could not do it. It's sad and hollow and full of hope. I love comics like this, since they show us the humane to conflicts and show us a world that no one but the ones who have to live through it knows. We learn so much by reading these and they are important pieces of history that would be otherwise lost. The structure of the comic could be better though, as it scatters slightly. I would've wanted some better resolution to Thi Bui's parents, since they were reduced to background noise even though they had an important role. With a resolution I mostly mean that This Bui could've analysed and portrayed their roles better.

The art is interesting and fits the theme well, even with the black-and-red hues that colors the sky with blood. The Asian look of the comic brings us closer to Vietnam in the same way Kunwu's comics do with China. Imagery is everything. Some of the panels are a bit dark and the backgrounds have been mostly reduced to black, which feels lazy - especially when the story is set in Vietnam. It would've been great to see how Vietnam at that time looked like more than what we now got. A tighter structure and better pacing would've earned this the fourth star easily, but the comic is still good and teaches us something new, which is always great.

I loved this! Great for fans of cultural graphic memoirs like Persepolis. The artwork is gorgeous as well.

I thought for most of the book that this would be a solid 4-star read, but the last twenty pages or so really brought all the threads together in such a poignant way that it elevated it another star for me. The author tackles her relationship with her parents, their personal histories, and the family's immigration from Vietnam to the US in the 70s all through the lens of becoming a mother herself. If you are interested in immigration stories, knowing more about Vietnam/the Vietnam War (I'm woefully ignorant on that subject), or graphic history in general you really need to read this book. Complex, heartbreaking, hopeful.

My God this book is gorgeous! The second I started reading I could not put this down, which has honestly been something of a rarity for me recently. The illustrations were in a single word, breathtaking, and they told the story with more depth then would have been possible in words alone. I had never heard of a memoir being written in this way before and this book has convinced me that graphic novels can be a perfect avenue to tell a personal story and to tell it well.

However, this book is not all just beauty, I can't stress enough how important this novel is. Thi's story is the narrative that we all need to read about in America and around the world today. It is a story of one families journey from Vietnam to America, but it is also so much more. This book breathes out the true history of what it was like in those times for those living in Vietnam and it is done with grace. I felt utter horror at some of the atrocities that occurred during that time. In America, you get such a narrow view it is disgusting, but this, this can take that view widen and deepen it until you realize that there is so much more to it than you could ever hope to know. It creates a humility in the mind and a tenderness in the heart for those immigrants and refugees that out there in the world today. It is unapologetic in its truth. Something that garners my full respect.

This novel also has to do with being human. With dealing with family relationships and trying to find where your meant to be through the past that has colored your present and future for better or for worst. It is about mothers and the strength a woman has regardless what is happening around her to do what is necessary. It is also one of the most honest representations of pregnancy and the fears a mother may have prior, during, and after that I have ever read.

One of my favorite parts of this novel is how Thi writes about her father. In a way this book was an outlet through which she began to truly understand her father and as she spoke of her talks with him built up their relationship and released a fear. Her father is a voice that is troubled yet so full of strength. The things he had seen and the troubles he went through created a huge impact on me.

Thi's mother had the same importance with a totally different perspective on how life was like. Her privileged beginnings at a what was a prestigious French school with a father who loved her dearly painted a beautiful yet almost hard picture of who she was. On many points her mother inspired me. She is the embodiment of a strong woman, who does all she can for her family.

The one last gift this book gave to me was the reminder that no matter who you are, where you came from, or what your dreams, you have a family and a life that is human and at the core not so different from my own or anyone else's. Love is love no matter the form. Every person has a right to be here. All humans have a right to a place this world.

This is an important book! I honestly don’t know what to say to convince you to read it, but please: READ THIS ONE! Buy it. Read it. Re-read it. Give it to your friends and family. Give it to your kids. Let them understand how wrong what is happening in the USA and the world is.

The Best We Could Do tells the story of the author’s, Thi Bui, journey to the US as a refugee in the midst of the Vietnam War, as well as her journey to understanding her parents, and what they went through.

First of all, the art is just so beautiful! It’s one of the first things I “see” in a graphic novel, because if the art is not appealing to you, it’s kind of hard to get into it, right? Well, this one is just gorgeous! Then the story is told in a very cool way, as it relates what Thi is feeling in her present life, and relating it to her upbringing and her parents’ experiences.

I have to say that I’m not well versed in Vietnam’s history. I’m from Portugal, born in the 80’s, and while here we know of the Vietnam’s war and everything that happened, it was always mentioned in a very superficial way, because at that moment we had other issues here in this country, such as a dictatorship of our own to learn about. The point is, I wasn’t aware of some of the things that happened, and the dynamics of what happened in WW2 and after. But I learned a lot while reading this book, because not only did it taught me, but it made me curious enough to go look online for more information.

This is the main point of books for me, to expand our horizons. A book that makes you question, and learn, and curious for more? It’s something that everyone should read.

In a point in history when refugees are being demonized by ignorant people, it’s more important than ever to support this book. To learn from someone who was a refugee herself. To read a side than most of us won’t be able to completely understand, but we can empathise, and try to learn to do better. Right?

SO, GUYS, THIS BOOK WILL BE OUT SOON. BUY IT, REVIEW IT, SHARE THE WORD. TALK ABOUT IT. READ IT!

I absolutely fell in love with this graphic memoir. I cannot believe how masterfully simple and yet emotionally complex Thi Bui's writing is; she employs such an intense economy of language that I would never have suspected she would be able to convey so tangled an identity in so few words. She lays bare the very knotted thoughts of a young Vietnamese girl who never felt proud, never felt good enough for either of her cultures and who struggled to attain the wholeness that American society claims that it can provide.

One of the things that struck me the most about the narrative was the remaking of Thi’s picture of her parents. As a new mother, she is forced to confront the idea of her aging parents – eternally disappointed by their treatment as elders in the new American society they have been forced into – and the fact that they were once in her shoes. Thi bravely peels back the layers of their story and tries to find common points of reference, all at once suffering from the horrible feeling that her parents might have been better without her which, even as an adult, is a crippling fact to swallow.

The art in this graphic novel is at once escapist and terrifying, providing a glimpse into everything that has, and continues to, go wrong with our political systems, all without depicting the familiar scenes of wartime displacement that the media has relied on for years. War is not always about the horrific bombings and the mass casualties: it is sometimes about all of the tiny, bitter wounds that suffocate four generations. I couldn't believe that such quietly replicated domestic scenes could so completely convey the experience of "othering" that she manages to detail. With a mooted colour palette of blues and whites (difficult not to associate these with the clean vision of America that Vietnamese refugees were sold) and the rusted reds, golds and oranges of the Vietnamese soil, the story takes the real centre stage.

She has made this graphic novel so many different things at once that I am still struggling days and days later to capture my thoughts. A graphic novel that I would push into everyone’s hands and a must-read for anyone invested in own voices literature.

The Best We Could Do features artwork so beautiful and story so intimate that I couldn't put it down. Thi Bui takes the reader along for a journey as she explores her family history and her relationships with her parents. The story is told in a relatable manner, it's poignant and it's easy to connect to (at least it was to me).
The story revolves around a Vietnamese family that escapes the war and immigrates to the US in the 70s. It depicts the struggles of being forced out of your own country, the nostalgia, the stress of leaving everything you know behind. At a time like this, with everything that's going on in the US, in the rest of the world, I feel that books like this one, that put faces and stories behind the statistics, they are more important than ever. That's why I recommend this book to everyone, especially to people who live around immigrants or areas that are affected by the current refugee crisis.

4.5 stars

The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir tells more than just a single family's somber story; it opens the door to history in a fresh new way. It is raw, emotional, and honest. Thi works backwards to give a full account of how she came to be who and where she is in life. This means her powerful story actually begins with her parents' and grandparents' struggles and sacrifices long before she was even a thought in her parents' minds, let alone born. The difficulties they had to overcome in Vietnam as they fought for a life that was worth living. Wow. One draw back for me was the irregular keeping of time midway through. It was a bit distracting and made it somewhat difficult to keep up with when the author was giving her sibling's backstories.

This is a memoir unlike any I've ever read before. The author's brilliant decision to release this in illustrated form ups the impact so much. Her illustrations (drawings, sketches, watercolors?) are simply stunning. The details are striking, and even though she uses only 2 or 3 colors she manages to work the absence of color to her advantage. The colors that are there pop and the blank spaces show such incredible depth. It's truly beautiful. The air of melancholy that hangs over this family from the first page was palpable and yet their story was inspiring. Words aside, I could feel the author's intense emotions flowing off the pages and it really moved me.

Thank you to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for this review copy and opportunity.