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Title: Pioneer Girl

Author: Bich Minh Nguyen

Narrator: Bernadette Dunne

Format: Unabridged

Length: 7 hrs and 8 mins

Language: English

Release date: 02-21-14

Publisher: Dreamscape Media, LLC

Ratings: 3.5 of 5 out of 10 votes

Genres: Fiction, Historical

Publisher's Summary:

Jobless with a PhD, Lee Lien returns home to her Chicago suburb from grad school, only to find herself contending with issues she's evaded since college. But when her brother disappears, he leaves behind an object from their mother's Vietnam past that stirs up a forgotten childhood dream: a gold-leaf brooch, abandoned by an American reporter in Saigon back in 1965, that might be an heirloom belonging to Laura Ingalls Wilder.

As Lee explores the tenuous facts of this connection, she unearths more than expected - a trail of clues and enticements that lead her from the dusty stacks of library archives to hilarious prairie life reenactments and ultimately to San Francisco, where her findings will transform strangers' lives as well as her own.

Critic Reviews:

"Elegant, sharp-eyed, and very funny, Pioneer Girl is ultimately about how one finds kinship - familial, cultural, literary - that transcends the usual lexicon about identity and belonging. Navigating Vietnamese 'immigrant guilt' and a stalled academic career, Lee Lien finds escape in trying to solve a literary mystery which leads her deep into her own heart and history. A wonderful read!" - Cristina Garcia, author of King of Cuba and Dreaming in Cuban

"I love how the Little House legend takes a wild detour into contemporary life in Pioneer Girl. Bich Minh Nguyen's wonderfully imagined literary history gets to the truth about mothers, daughters, frontiers, and the meaning of home. I couldn't put this down!" - Wendy McClure, author of The Wilder Life

Members Reviews:

Mesmerizing mix

If this intriguing layered novel only told the family focused story of Lee Lien, a book-nerdy young woman with an on-hold academic career trying to straddle the contrasting cultures and conflicting expectations of modern America, where she was born, and traditional pre-war Vietnam, where her strong-willed mother and gracious grandfather spent the earlier parts of their lives, that would have been enough to capture my interest.

If instead Pioneer Girl was simply a literary mystery, with Lee Lien so obsessed by a book related incident that may connect her family's former Saigon restaurant to the author(s) of the Little House on the Prairie series that she chases clues across the country, from dusty library shelves to colorfully painted San Francisco neighborhoods, even abandoning her normally somewhat passive upright nature long enough to slip archival materials into her handbag, I'd make sure to get my hands on a copy.

But Pioneer Girl is both books, and talk about obsessed, I couldn't put it down. This isn't the kind of mystery with dead bodies or definite answers, but that just made this coming of age quest all the more intriguing.

Pioneering then and now - an uneasy parallel.

I was very much attracted to this book because I am an immigrant who has spent a large part of her life working in refugee resettlement, and my children were devoted fans of Laura Ingalls Wilder's books which their father read to them faithfully every night after supper until all the many volumes were finished. Like the protagonist, I also wrote a long dissertation on literature and spent several years pursuing original material. So I approached reading this book with alacrity, feeling it could have been written especially for me, and plunging into it with the passion of an adolescent reader.