I adored the first 2/3 of this book, but the last 1/3 fell flat for me. The first 1/3 follows Lily Chen, an immigrant woman doing an unpaid internship in New York City who falls in love with a man who ends up being a pharmaceutical heir — with a strange connection to her parents. The second third follows Chen’s 15-year-old son, Nick, as he navigates life without a father figure. The last 1/3 follows Lily’s mother who immigrated to the United States with Lily. 3.5 stars

I literally gasped at the last sentence of this book. I LOVED the story of this complex family and slowly uncovering the journey this family has endured. It was amazing from start to finish and I enjoyed seeing different perspectives that tied into the mainline of the story.

This was an amazing read and I wish that there had been more to see how Nick, Lily, and May re-connect!

OK, I absolutely loved this book. Multigenerational family sagas told from switching perspectives are my jam, and Real Americans 100% delivered. The narrative structure kept me turning pages (a no small feat since I was traveling the week I picked up my copy!) and the language and pointed observations about what it means to be a person, an American, and an ethical human being will stay with me for a long time. Even though Real Americans deals with complex topics such as immigrant experience and exploration of personal identity and what it’s like to inhabit a white or a non-white body as a person of color, the book is approachable for a wide variety of readers. It’s going to be a great book club pick when it comes out!
Also, one word on science: I have a biomedical sciences PhD and was not bothered by any scientific inaccuracies (a pet peeve of mine!). In fact, I am very impressed by how thoroughly and accurately the science was represented, given the sci-fi angle to the story. It would have been easy to go overboard and paint May’s work as grotesque but I actually found it pretty believable in a way that aligned well with the state of scientific progress at each given time period.
Overall, I highly recommend this book. I enjoyed it immensely.

Thank you to NetGalley and A. A. Knopf for the ARC!

I loved this book. The juxtaposition of 1999 and 2021 is wonderfully done-so many details I'd forgotten about which brought me right back to the Y2K days. The thoughts on race and culture are part of the whole story-which is essentially nurture vs nature but presented in a way that felt new.

An interesting, cerebral exploration of whether or not destiny can be determined genetics, and the ethics of making choices for unborn children. Thank you to the publisher and netgalley!

This was so interesting and surprising, didn’t go where I thought it would at all. I liked the window into the Cultural Revolution and the twist that connects this family. I wished for a bit more emotional exposition, as everyone was so interesting and I believed all their choices, but at times it felt like big things happened and the characters just moved on without reacting. Also felt it sort of lost focus at the end, trying to tie up loose ends and give a satisfying denouement, but overall enjoyed this book very much!
Thanks very much to NetGalley for my copy and introducing me to this author!

Real Americans was an enthralling and beautiful read. With an air of mystery, the book explores the consequences (and possibilities) of DNA alteration and the morality questions that come with it. In my opinion, it goes above and beyond as a story not just about epigenetics but also about the meaning of family history and relationships, immigration, class, race, and love to identity, and how they all intersect. Khong deeply develops each of the three main characters while maintaining the threads and central questions of the story. Altogether excellent, it will stay on my mind for a long time.

I really enjoyed the first part of this book, but it quickly lost steam for me. I was actively engaged in the goings-on of Lily. However, the writing throughout was beautiful and captivating.

Real Americans hooked me from page 1. I loved Lily’s story and found her incredibly relatable despite having such a different background and experience than I did. I wish we got to hear more from her as an adult.

I expected a sweeping saga — which I certainly got — but did not expect the (it feels too real for sci fi) direction it went.

I felt disappointed at how Matthew turned out. But that’s all part of the story. Learning about the May’s coming of age in Beijing was fascinating. The author clearly did lots of research and I learned a lot. And it was incredibly well written.

And lastly, that lotus seed… do we think it really did what it seemed to do? This book will give you lots to think about.

Thank you Net Galley for providing this in exchange for my honest review.

I’m frustrated because I don’t have the language to explain how much I loved this book.

It’s not that this book needs a review from me—I expect that this book will, deservedly, be everywhere in 2024—but I feel that I owe it something. This reading experience gave me so much. Lily’s story reminded me of living in New York in my early 20s, all the possibilities, all the questions: every decision meant something. In Nick, I saw my depression mirrored back to me. A first love—and also, sometimes, the world—breaking my heart. I learned so much from May’s story; I gained so much from her suffering.

I’m jealous of everyone who gets to read this for the first time when it is released. This is the book about which I’ll be screaming to everyone in 2024.

Rachel Khong does an excellent job of weaving together a multigenerational story about a Chinese family while infusing a little bit a sci-fi and mystery into the plot. Khong's historical depictions of life in China, especially for women was pretty accurate. The heartbreaking life choices Lily, Nick, and May struggle with is beautifully written. I personally found May's story to be the most riveting. I could not put this book down.

I was provided an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.

Real Americans is the story of wealth, immigrants, family expectations, secrets, forgiveness, and the interpretation of what being “American” means. Fascinating book with a cast of interesting and well-developed characters. . Find out what happens when family expectations of "perfection" and a morally questionable decision collide.

Another wonderful novel byRachel Kong.I was swept away by Lilly her story her world.Spent my weekend curled up on my couch reading this unputdownable novel.#realamericans #netgalley

I loved this book so much. It sucks you in immediately and I was so invested in Lily and Matthew’s love story from their first meeting. I worried the next two portions wouldn’t live up to the first and I was wrong. I think the magical realism element was a tad underdeveloped and I would have loved to see more resolution between Nick, Matthew, and Lily, but ultimately this will be a book I think about for a very long time! (4.5)

*Thank you to the publisher and netgalley for this arc*

Real Americans is a stunner. I struggle to share too much about the plot because it was so fun to go into it with minimal background knowledge. It is a multi-generational story about fate, family, and ethics. Rachel Khong's writing is magnificent. Through the varied POVs you discover the same family history through different perspectives and timelines. The characters were compelling and complex. Storylines were so innovative and I could not stop reading.

This story was so beautiful. The ending was perfect. I can't wait to buy a copy of this for my own library and read it again and again.

Giving 2 stars for the literal rating of “it was ok”. The magical realism piece to this novel was interesting but nothing was done with it - there was absolutely no reason for it to be in the book and if you removed it the story would be exactly the same. I found myself most compelled by Nick’s sections, and least of all by Lily’s. I’m am not convinced that her reasons for cutting ties with Matthew and her mother are warranted, and it does feel like her sections were more about her relationships with the other characters than actually about her. There were a number of great quotes regarding the philosophy of nature vs nurture

Thank you to NetGalley for this Advanced Readers Copy.

I started Rachel Khong's newest novel on a Saturday morning and quickly abandoned any other plans I had for the day as the story kept me in a tight grasp until I reached the final page. Riveting story about the multi-generational intersection of two families with deep exploration into morality, privilege, and secrets parents keep from their children. Real Americans also plays with time in a unique way, both in how one lineage of characters experiences it and how Khong moves through it on the page. A wonderfully different follow-up to Goodbye, Vitamin--can't wait to see what's next from this favorite author!

I felt so many emotions while reading this book: joy, anger, sadness, etc. Despite being told in three parts, there was no disconnect between them and they flowed harmoniously. The storytelling in this book is brilliant and so well done. By the end of the book I felt a connection with all three main characters, and with that I felt what they felt at different parts of the book. Even though I’m not huge into science, I didn’t feel confused or disengaged by the content. In fact, reading this actually made me want to learn more about that field of research. I don’t think there are any flaws in this book, and I will recommend it to everyone. This is one of my favorite reads of the year!

Many thanks to Penguin Random House and Netgalley for this arc!!

“Real Americans” is told by three separate narrators in three distinct sections. The first begins in 1999 with Lily, a Chinese American daughter of geneticists who immigrated from China in the late sixties. At the beginning of her narrative, Lily is in her early twenties working as an unpaid intern in New York City. At a party she meets Matthew, a wealthy white man with blonde hair and blue eyes, the heir to a pharmaceutical empire. She falls in love with him and they get married, despite the fact that she doesn’t feel like she fits into his world. After several miscarriages, Lily has a son Nico through in vitro fertilization. Nico looks nothing like her, but instead is nearly identical to his father. After going through her mother’s files, Lily discovers something shocking which alienates her from her mother and Matthew’s family.

The second narrative is “Nick” (Nico), beginning in 2021 when he is a high school student living alone with his mother, Lily, on an island off the coast of Washington State. Nick is a loner, with only one friend, Timothy. Despite his “anglo” looks, Nick feels alienated and isolated from his peers, which isn’t helped by his mother’s insistence that he not be exposed to technology, such as cell phones and internet. Furthermore, his mother refuses to divulge anything regarding the identity of his father or his whereabouts. After high school graduation, Nick and Timothy both leave home to attend Yale. May, Lily’s mother, is the focus of the third narrative, which is set in 2030, where May is living in poverty in San Francisco, estranged from her daughter Lily, who she hasn’t spoken to in years. There she meets Nick, to whom she tells her story, hoping he can convince his mother to reconcile with her.

Initially, I had mixed feelings about the book. On the one hand, it was beautifully written with haunting, spare prose which somehow conveys the loneliness and isolation felt by each character. However, at times the book seemed somewhat long, focusing as it did on the inner thoughts of the first person narrators. While the first person perspective gave an intimacy to the characters that is lacking in third person accounts, it sometimes felt monotonous only seeing and feeling events through one set of eyes at a time.

That being said, one thing I discovered as I read the book was that if the reader approaches it with patience, realizing that the narrative will unfold slowly and takes the time to enjoy the prose, reading the book becomes a much more enjoyable experience. Ultimately, it’s a book about alienation, loneliness, and feelings of isolation and as mentioned previously, the language and tone of the book does an excellent job conveying these emotions.

Thank you to NetGalley and Alfred A. Knopf for providing me an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.

This is an astonishing book. The author describes it as a book about fortune, which I guess it is--how the fortunes of Mei, her daughter Lily, and Lily's son Nick all rise and fall based on their interactions with the wealthy Maier family. I really liked the structure of the book--it's divided into three sections, the first of which tells of Lily's relationship with Matthew Allen, the second tells of Nick's late adolescent life in Seattle, and the third tells of Mei's history. The writing is so beautiful, and it will have you thinking about what it means to be, as the title suggests, a real American--because of where you were born, who you were born to, how you survived your life. I loved this book.