Lucky Seed
A Novel
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4.2 • 6 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A USA TODAY BESTSELLER
"Lucky Seed is a family saga, a romance, a bodice ripper—a crotch ripper too—a diasporic Asian American family novel, and a thriller. A family story for a family like this could never have just one genre and Huang knows it and has fun with it. The result is thrilling to read, addictive, and full of heart and hijinks. Reader, I cackled." —Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
Succession meets Crazy Rich Asians in this chaotic, darkly funny romp about the lengths a wealthy family will take to ensure the birth of a male heir from the gay black sheep of their clan.
The billionaire Sun Clan of Greater Los Angeles is your typical American family, with power-struggling aunties, emasculated uncles, scheming cousins, scandalous secrets and a fortune teller on retainer. But at the end of each combative day, the Suns are chained together with golden handcuffs, whether they like it or not.
Yet strange storms are a-brewing. Their matriarch, Roses Sun, is grappling with an existential crisis: she must produce a male heir that bears the clan's surname. She fears that if her generation is the one in which their esteemed lineage ends, they will be punished as "hungry ghosts" in the afterlife—an ancient but very real Asian superstition.
Faced with this terrifying fate, Roses summons her favorite nephew, Wayward. Believing him to possess the "lucky seed," Roses presents Wayward with a mandatory suggestion: to father a baby boy who will inherit everything. When the other members of the Sun Clan catch wind of Roses's plot, all hells break loose. Wayward's family will now clash like never before in an epic war over the future of the Suns…if there is a future at all.
Yet through the chaos, Wayward sees opportunity. What if he can leverage all the conflict into a solution for his problematic family? What if he can reunite the Sun Clan by healing them? And what if the tumultuous Suns can finally learn how to love each other for the first time?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Huang (The Emperor and the Endless Palace) channels Succession with this delectable drama of a billionaire Chinese American family and their Machiavellian matriarch's search for an heir. Roses Sun became CEO of Sunfang Global after the death of her father, Big Boss Sun, who cofounded the construction and logging conglomerate with the powerful Fang family before screwing them over. Roses's father stipulated in his will that the company must pass to a male descendant, but with her younger brother deemed incompetent, there's no apparent heir. Her fortune teller claims that if her family fails to produce an heir, they'll become "hungry ghosts" in the afterlife, prompting Roses to scheme with her gay nephew, Wayward. She makes him president and promises that if his son, if he has one, will take ownership of the company trust. The board members recoil, not only because they're homophobic but because they loathe Wayward's plan to transition the company to green building practices. The scheme also upsets Roses's daughter, April, who fell out of favor with her mom after she left the company to care for her daughter. The delightfully over-the-top plot is rife with shifting alliances, manipulations, and intergenerational tensions. Readers will eat this up.
Customer Reviews
Lots of intrigue but
There is a lot of potential here, lots of intriguing characters, but I found the plot twists and turns to be really hard to follow. The story jumps around between multiple characters’ POV’s, which sometimes provide a nice juxtaposition around what one person knows and another person doesn’t, but it can be confusing in others. There’s a lot to wrangle here because it involves two rival families, lots of kids, marriages, etc. It takes a long time to fully unravel who is aligned with whom, which. characters are opps and why. A lot of story threads are left open until the final pages of the book, which could be fine, except quite a lot of twists are introduced in the final parts of the story and then very quickly resolved. There’s also one twist with a key character that is revealed at the end with very little explanation. It’s a complicated tale but I think the story structuring made it overly complex.