Former beauty queen turned refugee Xuan Trung is obsessed with Vietnamese zodiac signs. She frequently gives unsolicited advice to her three daughters on their careers, housing, and love lives based on their birth dates. Yet, all of Xuan's daughters diverge from her expectations, and none are concerned about their zodiac signs or their Vietnamese lineage.

NEW YEAR is a debut with a captivating premise but one that reads like two books, sadly. The first half of the book is written from Xuan and her three daughters' perspectives through different points in their lives. Tran beautifully depicts various historical events like the Vietnam War, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina, and the impact on the Trung household. The second half of the book is told in reverse chronology, where the readers get glimpses of Xuan's maternal ancestors all the way back to the Trung Sisters' Rebellion in 40 AD.

NEW YEAR's multi-generational focus on women in the Trung family reminds me of THE MANY DAUGHTERS OF AFONG MOY (Jamie Ford).
Unfortunately, where AFONG MOY focuses on particular events in each character and depicts how inherited grief passes down through generations, NEW YEAR's lack of a focal point with each generation makes it a difficult read to concentrate. Couple this with a story that moves backward in time, and you get a novel that doesn't go anywhere.

Considering NEW YEAR to be a strongly character-driven book, I wish there were more on Xuan and her daughters in present-day New Orleans. The first 50% emphasize their struggles as immigrants and first-generation Vietnamese-Americans, and I would've loved to see more development in their stories. Similarly, the second half reads more like a character parade as the readers only spend a few paragraphs with the Trung Sisters.

I absolutely adored this book! This multigenerational novel focuses on the woman in a Vietnamese family, which I really enjoyed. I loved the characters and their arcs. The interacting perspectives was wonderful, and the writing is beautiful. I loved the sections of this book that focused on the cuisine in Vietnamese culture. I cannot wait to read more by this author!

New Orleans is my very favorite city and Asian culture has been a lifelong interest for me. There is that aspect to the book but there is so much more. If I were to choose the theme at the heart of the story it would be the complicated relationships between mothers and daughters and how they are influenced by the baggage carried from the mother’s past experiences as well as their fierce hopes for their daughters futures. Starting in the near present in New Orleans the story makes it’s way back through five generations of women giving some interesting Vietnamese history, a bit of the supernatural, and even some satisfying revenge against a few deserving characters. It takes a bit of concentration to keep the characters straight as their histories unfold but the effort is definitely worthwhile.

I enjoyed this one, especially the amount of history that is at the forefront of the book.

There were a lot of characters and the story was hard to follow at times, but I feel as though the overall concept and execution was good. I agree this would be a good book club pick. Pacing and wonky time jumps aside, a very good read.

3/5

𝙀𝙫𝙚𝙣 𝙖𝙛𝙩𝙚𝙧 𝙛𝙤𝙧𝙩𝙮-𝙤𝙣𝙚 𝙮𝙚𝙖𝙧𝙨 𝙝𝙚𝙧𝙚, 𝙨𝙝𝙚 𝙬𝙤𝙧𝙚 𝘼𝙢𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙣 𝙘𝙞𝙩𝙞𝙯𝙚𝙣𝙨𝙝𝙞𝙥 𝙬𝙞𝙩𝙝 𝙙𝙞𝙨𝙘𝙤𝙢𝙛𝙤𝙧𝙩, 𝙡𝙞𝙠𝙚 𝙖 𝙥𝙖𝙞𝙧 𝙤𝙛 𝙨𝙝𝙤𝙚𝙨 𝙝𝙖𝙡𝙛 𝙖 𝙨𝙞𝙯𝙚 𝙩𝙤𝙤 𝙨𝙢𝙖𝙡𝙡. 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙨𝙝𝙤𝙚𝙨 𝙘𝙤𝙪𝙡𝙙 𝙛𝙞𝙩, 𝙮𝙚𝙨, 𝙗𝙪𝙩 𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙮 𝙨𝙩𝙚𝙥 𝙧𝙚𝙢𝙞𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙙 𝙝𝙚𝙧 𝙨𝙝𝙚 𝙨𝙝𝙤𝙪𝙡𝙙 𝙣𝙤𝙩 𝙗𝙚 𝙬𝙚𝙖𝙧𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙩𝙝𝙚𝙢, 𝙩𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙨𝙝𝙚 𝙨𝙝𝙤𝙪𝙡𝙙 𝙗𝙚 𝙬𝙚𝙖𝙧𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙨𝙤𝙢𝙚𝙩𝙝𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙚𝙡𝙨𝙚.
E.M. Tran confronts erasure, of one’s family history and culture. Her parents left behind a Vietnam that no longer exists, surviving through the dangerous collapse of Saigon. E.M. Tran grew up with parents who didn’t reveal much about their past before coming to America and the silence that they held about the subject came from a place of pain. You would do well to read the author’s note. Certainly, the adolescent self-absorption she talks about is common to most children, not seeing our parents as people with struggles outside our own, but for children of refugees it’s much harder to absorb facts of lineage. Generally, the extended family is divided, living in another country and speaking a different language. Civil war, trauma, it’s not something easily expressed nor understood. How do you get anyone, let alone a parent, to talk about losing the life they had before? What words can express the feelings of losing your country or how you molded yourself to fit into another? Tran’s novel is a penance of sorts, she tells us so in her author’s note. A means to shape her family history into some sort of recognizable form.

Xuan Trung calls her three daughters’ the night before Lunar New Year, a tradition of hers, to give them their horoscope. She has diligently studied from a book and Zodiac calendar with moon phases she bought from a Vietnamese bookstore in New Orleans. She calls them in their birth order, just like in a zodiac origin story, feeling herself akin to the Jade Emperor. She sees her three children as being the animals in the myth who fight their way to be first in heaven. Trac, Nhi and Trieu aren’t interested in their mother’s prophecies any more than they are in learning how to cook Vietnamese dishes, despite Xuan’s insistence. Xuan consults the yearly horoscopes out of love and care with the hopes of thwarting off danger, disaster, financial ruin, and to avoid missing out on opportunities. If only her children understood. She has given up so many things in her life, even the beauty pageant she won in Vietnam, and when she and Cuong moved into their only home in America, she bought a cheap trophy as a reminder, leaving it to sit on her fireplace mantel. There is a gleam of pride to what life was like before, when she was a beauty queen.

Eldest daughter Trac, born in the year of the goat, is a lawyer working long hours and fearful of never measuring up. A dutiful Vietnamese daughter would marry a successful man, produce healthy children, but she doesn’t want those traditional trappings. Their father, Cuong, feels disappointed that his girls have grown up as American children not caring about being Vietnamese, blaming himself for providing them with all the American opportunities. He pushes things on them they don’t want, good intentions or not. What Trac wants is Belinda, but she is too afraid to admit this. Nhi, year of the tiger, is in Vietnam, a contestant on a bachelor dating show, which is beginning to feel very contrived when she is chosen for the solo date. She thinks a lot about what it means to be an Asian in the industry. Youngest, Trieu, is the writer in the family feeling it may be the thing to make her feel equal to her successful, older sisters. She is embarrassed to realize how far away she is from her Vietnamese roots, no longer fluent as she was as a child. According to her mother, she used to speak Vietnamese perfectly well, but Trieu can’t say if this is fact or fiction. Her recollections aren’t strong, and she wants to understand more about her culture, even if at times her mother’s fantasies about what being a dragon means, that Trieu should be naturally good a many creative endeavors), can feel like a curse. This family has faced the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, war,

Xuan’s youth is shared in Part II, with her mother Tien’s worries, also a woman who relies on fortune telling, divination. Xuan too felt she couldn’t live up to her own mother’s expectations, demands. Tien certainly doesn’t think beauty pageants are worth anything, in fact, she views them as a waste of time, but she sees bigger troubles on the horizon. Could Tien have been right? This is the point in the story where the women in the family line reaches into the past, as far back as 226 AD. It is a brave and harrowing telling of their lives. They are all connected but the opportunities Xuan’s daughters have are things the women who came before them could never imagine. It is a novel that asks what we owe our ancestors, our parents, how culture or erasing it molds us, and why those who came before us, the very people who made us, sometimes avoid sharing the memories of the past. Is it a necessary evil to shed your former identity to fit into your new country? It was interesting reading about the mythology and beliefs, easy to understand how deeply embedded they can become and how hurtful your children’s dismissal of such things can feel. The book also measures how it feels to be torn between two cultures for children of refugees and immigrants. Good read.

Published October 11, 2022

Harlequin Trade Publishing

Hanover Square Press

Full review to come on Goodreads and Amazon. Thank you to the publisher, author, and NetGalley for a review copy.

This just-released novel is spectacular. It follows an unconventional structure—part one is labeled “2016-1975,” telegraphing the novel’s steady march backward. We start in 2016 with sisters Trac, Nhi, and Trieu, who have grown up in New Orleans with their mother Xuan. We see them pursue law careers, appear on a version of the Bachelor, weather Katrina, attend Vietnamese festivals, get bullied at school. We keep going back and see Xuan bury her mother, Tien; their escape via boat from Sai Gon; beauty pageants in both New Orleans and Sai Gon; and we go backwards still to the family’s ancestors in French-occupied Vietnam. And that’s not even all—it’s hard to sum up this book. It is staggering how much Tran manages to cover.

The Trungs have common experiences of racism, feeling not Vietnamese enough, and gender-based violence. Even when some of the scenes retread Asian American tropes, Tran writes them so well that they feel fresh and necessary. It’s hard to decide which of these women, all of whom engage in their own forms of resistance (whether to colonial occupation, racism, patriarchy, or simply their parents’ expectations), I liked the most (ok, it was probably the gay one who really wanted to please her parents). The progression back in time reveals some secrets and clarifies some grey areas, but many are left unresolved—the novel is somehow both epic and slice-of-life in its mode. The whole thing is knitted together by the women’s preoccupation with the Vietnamese zodiac, which shapes how they see the luck in their life, their personalities, and their relationships with each other.

This is Tran’s first book, and I’m so excited to read more from her in the future. It’s not as long as you might expect given the epic scope—read it now!

Thank you to NetGalley and Hanover Square Press for allowing me to read this ARC!

Content Warning: death, violence, racism, misogyny, emotional abuse, sexual harassment, rape, colonization.


The Trung family lives in modern-day New Orleans, Louisiana. The three daughters are all completely different, but each is striving for her own kind of peace and freedom in her life: Trac, the eldest, a respected lawyer who is coming to terms with her sexuality; Nhi, who has joined a dating show in the hopes of making it big as an actress; and the baby of the family, Trieu, who is finding it difficult to find her place in life at all. Their mother, Xuan, the former Saigon beauty queen of 1973, tries desperately to determine her daughters' fates through the usage of the Vietnamese Zodiac, but in her attempts, ends up pushing them further away from her. As they all try to come to terms with both their pasts and their inevitable futures, E.M. Tran traces the lineage of the Trung women through history, asking questions about the value of learned histories, and what it means to be a daughter and a mother.

The concept of tracing a female line of ancestors back through time is what sold this book to me. As someone who absolutely loves generational stories that deal with the history of a singular family, I had a feeling that E.M. Tran's Daughters of the New Year would be something that would offer both something new to me, and something familiar that I already adore. Even in my quest to read more diverse books, I've actually read few novels by Vietnamese authors, and I was so excited to pick this up and delve into a story that deals with some of Vietnam's complicated past while never forgetting to center the powerful female characters that make this so compulsively readable.

The story starts with Xuan Trung, the Metal Tiger mother of the three Trung girls, as she tries to divine their fate for the coming New Year. We quickly get the feeling that the girls feel both drawn to their mother's stories, even as they struggle with their mixed disdain and love for their mother's forceful belief in the Zodiac and astrology. All of the characters in this book are equally strong, and although it's usually a given that I'll have a favorite when reading something with multiple POV characters, this time, I felt entranced by every single woman that Tran puts on the page. Although this story deals with themes of racism, being an outsider, and most especially the complicated relationships unique to immigrant families, any daughter or mother reading this -- no matter where she's from, who she is, or the particular circumstances that make up her life -- will instantly see themselves in the Trung women.

Tran's exploration of generational pain and trauma is powerful. She asks the important question that has plagued families since the dawn of time: how important are learned histories, and when and how should they be relayed to children? There's no real "right" answer, but even painful histories are important, particularly, I think, to the children of immigrants. The desire to know where your family comes from, what has shaped them into who they are, is something all of us yearn for.

My only complaints with this book are mainly selfish: the timeline goes backwards, and so we have only our own imagination when it comes to what happens to Tran, Nhi, Trieu and their mother! I would have loved to see a bit of closure, but honestly, I think that's another element of what Tran is talking about here -- for many families, there is no "closure." Perhaps Xuan will never be able to talk about the fall of Saigon, or her life before Vietnam was torn in two. Perhaps the girls will never quite find the answers they're looking for. It's a meditation on the sometimes unspeakable past. There were moments where Tran's writing could be a bit simplistic, losing me a little, but the story itself is so powerful that it didn't alter my rating by much.

Highly recommended!

I felt fully engaged in this story of Vietnamese refugees in New Orleans as we worked backwards to understand the burden of generational trauma to this family. After I finished reading it, I felt like I had a much better understanding of what the Viet Nam war meant to the Vietnamese women themselves. The story is so complete that it would be an excellent choice for a book club. I hope it gains wide readership.

Thank you to NetGalley for an advance copy of this novel. It was a thoughtful and engaging way to understand more about Viet Nam.

An interesting novel about a family based on the author’s own roots.
Framing Vietnam, an ever changing landscape over the last 50 years, Tran uses the unusual approach of going backwards in history. She captures her characters from 2016 back to the 1970s.
It’s an interesting slice of a country and people who experienced a lot.

This is a perceptive and powerful story about the generations of one family and how their past shapes their present and future. It starts by focusing on Xuan Trung, a refugee from Vietnam who build a new life in New Orleans. She is now mostly focused on the lives of her adult daughters, each of whom have pursued paths that veer from what Xuan and her ex-husband expected, whether professionally or personally. As the three daughters face their own challenges, they sense from their mom that they do not know the full story of her childhood or the events that led to their lives in America -- a story that is more complex and surprising than they could have ever imagined.

With well crafted characters, the story examines interesting themes related to family, community, and legacy.

Highly recommended!

This book is told in three parts, working backwards through three generations of a Vietnamese family who now lives in New Orleans. The contemporary story was excellent and because it was at the beginning of the book I was excited to keep reading. However the stories of the other two generations weren't as strong and because they were each told separately, by the end of the book I had lost interest (even though the actual story of the rubber plantation in Vietnam was fascinating so I shouldn't have lost interest.) I hope Tran continues to write fiction about Vietnamese-Americans in the contemporary United States, because that is where she shines as a writer.

The setting of this book is beautiful, but even more than that, the depth of history leaves you rapt in the story and lost in the tales of survival and family legacy. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the free advanced copy.

“Each of us is always fighting a war.”

Daughters of the New Year is a captivatingly rich debut novel from E.M. Tran, about generations of Vietnamese women and the shared history that both unites them and drives wedges between them.

The novel starts in modern day New Orleans, working its way backwards and detailing the lives of several Trung women all the way to Lady Trieu in 226 AD and the Trung sisters’ rebellion in 40 AD. But the four women we start with may seem a far cry from these powerful warriors.

Xuan and her daughters Trac, Nhi, and Trieu are immigrants from Vietnam to America, and Tran hones in on this experience. For Xuan’s daughters especially, this manifests in a confusing “in between” nationality, a war with both American prejudices and Vietnamese cultural heritage, a divide between parent and child, and the shame that festers from all of this.

Tran is no stranger to this experience. She frankly and vulnerably details in her author’s note her own shame for not knowing much of her family history, and for “participating in the erasure of [her] own family.” She uses her own mother’s pageant trophy as inspiration for the novel, as a way to embrace her heritage.

In the novel, it’s a possession of Xuan’s which serves as a connection for the Vietnamese American family back to Vietnam (even if, as we learn in the first chapter, the trophy itself doesn’t actually come from Saigon). I think it represents Vietnam to the Trung family–all memories to Xuan and mostly mysteries to her daughters. Still, it’s a tie to Xuan’s upbringing in Vietnam. And there are still other ties to the generations of other women in their family, which Tran imaginatively pieces together.

Even while juggling so many pieces, Tran has an incredible talent to completely immerse us in each woman’s life. The multiple perspectives can, at times, be difficult to follow.

I sometimes felt like I was being wrenched away from a character I was just getting to know. But diving back in was always so easy, because there isn’t a single character in Daughters of the New Year who isn’t two-dimensional, with her own distinct and compelling voice. Each contributes to a complex tapestry of an incredible and moving generational saga.

Our thanks to NetGalley and Hanover Square Press for the advanced reader’s copy! Daughters of the New Year will be published on October 11th 2022. You can pre-order the novel here!

A stunning family saga of generations of Vietnamese women. Know that it moves in reverse-starting in the present day with Tran, Nhi, and Trieu, the adult daughters of Xuan who are making their way in the US. Xuan, a firm believer in astrology, is committed to the idea that each of her daughters must live the way the stars dictate each year. They've struggled since childhood with being different- first as Vietnamese and now as Vietnamese women who don't speak the language or fully appreciate the culture. Their story and much of Xuan's is set in New Orleans but the echoes of Vietnam, the war, and the impact of being a refugee never leave. Xuan's life in Vietnam was so different than her life in the US, and the lives of her foremothers even more so. She's an amazing character and Tran has done a terrific job of nuancing her. The fact that the story is told in reverse works in some ways and less in others, as the last third of the book was different in tone that the first two thirds. Thanks to the publisher for the ARC. Great read that I suspect will have many nodding their heads in recognition.

Tran's story is filled with all the nuance that comes from telling an immigrant family's history, its impact on their children, and the ensuing ramifications of pressure and ultimate expectations. It is a multi-generational tale that focuses on the Trung women, a matrilineal line that is strong, yet vulnerable, but fights for what is theirs and to survive.

The floundering of each daughter is palpable: how do you connect with a language that your tongue cannot embrace; what about the separation felt from country and identity because of a lack of experience and interaction; how do you tell your parents that you feel apart, from your heritage, community, and people?

For each of the Trung girls, success is expected and anything other than the path set out for them by their parents is wholly unacceptable. The lack of communication and secret-keeping puts a toll on the familial structure that seemingly only affects Trac, Nhi, and Trieu. But their mother feels even if she cannot speak it, the weight of what is expected of her to prepare her girls for a world that will most likely chew them up and discard them.

But as with all family secrets, the ghosts will seek a way to be seen and heard, for the loss of a country and heritage to be confronted, and for healing to be attempted. I did want more development of the sisters as they are now at their own stage in life. I felt as if their storylines ended abruptly. But I wholly enjoyed how Tran took us from the present into the past, tracing the histories and experiences of each Trung woman, it was done brilliantly.

A riveting multi-generational family story that intertwines the lives of women from Vietnam to America. The focus is mainly on the last two generations, starting with Xuan and the three daughters, Trac, Nhi and Trieu and how they all fit into their American lives a bit differently than they might have expected. Brief mentions of Xuan's mother and past generations in Vietnam provide historical context and show the struggles across the generations. A compelling look into what does it mean to have to reimagine your life, in the case of Xuan, or how to fit in when people either see you as too Vietnamese or not Vietnamese enough, in the case of the three daughters.

I am a sucker for a slow, immersive, multi-generational historical fiction. I love the unwinding of family secrets and histories. Families are spaces of ordinary and extraordinary trauma; intense love also breeds intense regret, jealousies, animosities. Tragedy binds and creates familial bonds stronger than blood. And, of course, as a historian I love getting a glimpse into a past where the reasons and logics behind piety, duty, and love are complex, sometimes contradictory, colored with personal suffering, traditions, and the institutions of humanity-at-large — as in this case, French colonialism and Confucian patriarchy.

That is the hinge around which Daughters of the New Year swivels. This novel is an honest portrait of the brutal historical and cultural complexities that shape familial love.

The reader is given a privileged view into the minds, hearts, and philosophies of several generations of Vietnamese women. It is a novel about why and how mothering, motherhood, and filial duty are never straightforward, why these acts of love are volatile constructions of history and culture. Time and place alter the modes by which we care for one another, show each other love. What is an expression of affection for one generation is manipulation to the next. What is piety to one generation is an empty gesture for another. The reasons why mothers do what they do, why sometimes their love crushes their daughters, are molded by forces beyond their control: war, racism, patriarchy. Yet, for all those differences, there is one motivation behind these acts: the desire to provide the next generation with more than what the previous had. This is the love embedded in families.

The reader is given a privileged view of an excavation of familial love through Vietnamese and American history. Through chapters narrated by a daughter of this family, daughters descended through a matriarchal bloodline, the reader gets an interior view of the characters’ minds. Each of them has a different voice in this novel. EM. Tran’s prose is a beautiful thread throughout, binding their stories together, but each of the characters speak with their own, unique voice. Each chapter reveals its narrator’s logic, their historical context; explains why they did the things they did — even perhaps knowing that those acts would somehow traumatize the next generation.

There is Nhi and her sisters, the American generation. There is their mother, Xuan; their aunt, Xuan’s sister; there is their grandmother; a line of women, as if holding hands, unbroken, their spirits resiliently swaying in the winds of change and time going all the way back to the epic and legendary Trung sisters. Daughters of the New Year is about these women.

Fans of Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club, or Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko will enjoy Tran’s Daughters of the New Year.

Daughters explores the family dynamics of a Vietnamese American family. The book begins with Xuan and her 3 adult daughters as the revolving narrators. I really enjoyed the beginning when Xuan and basing her expectations of each daughter by their zodiac sign. I found that aspect so interesting. The expectations Xuan has versus what each daughter has of themselves is the real story. There is so much pressure they feel to fit a certain mold that they are all constantly striving for something.

It’s a shame that I am reading this so soon after reading The Fortunes of Jaded Women since the story focus was similar. However, I enjoyed Fortune so much more. I really wanted to like this one more than I did, but unfortunately the writing did not keep my interest here.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Set in current day New Orleans, mother Xuan Trung is obsessed with predicting her three daughters' futures. Using their Vietnamese zodiac signs, she tries to determine if her Tiger, Dragon and Goat will live up to their potential.

But each sister has her opinion on how her life will evolve. Trac is a successful lawyer with a hidden sex life. Nhi is competing in a Bachelor type show, as the only woman of color on the program. Youngest sister, Trieu is an aspiring writer who’s determined to research her family roots to learn more about her culture. As the book progresses, flashbacks to Xuan’s time in Saigon and the grandmother’s story reveal the long lost history of the Trung family.

The communication and language issues that the sisters face with their mom highlight the gulfs that can develop between generations. The sister’s difficulties assimilating in at school illustrate the balance necessary to be accepted; as being “American enough” for the white population but not “too American” for the Vietnamese immigrants. A stunning debut novel written with a touch of magic that highlights the resilience of these women. I found the beginning hard to follow in spots but the story’s unraveling of political history and culture is a fascinating tale.

Thanks to Harlequin Trade Publishing and NetGalley for the opportunity to review this title before its release.