Real Americans
A novel
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4.2 • 332 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • READ WITH JENNA’S MAY BOOK CLUB PICK • From the award-winning author of Goodbye, Vitamin: How far would you go to shape your own destiny? An exhilarating novel of American identity that spans three generations in one family and asks: What makes us who we are? And how inevitable are our futures?
"Mesmerizing"—Brit Bennett • "A page turner.”—Ha Jin • “Gorgeous, heartfelt, soaring, philosophical and deft"—Andrew Sean Greer • "Traverses time with verve and feeling."—Raven Leilani
Real Americans begins on the precipice of Y2K in New York City, when twenty-two-year-old Lily Chen, an unpaid intern at a slick media company, meets Matthew. Matthew is everything Lily is not: easygoing and effortlessly attractive, a native East Coaster, and, most notably, heir to a vast pharmaceutical empire. Lily couldn't be more different: flat-broke, raised in Tampa, the only child of scientists who fled Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Despite all this, Lily and Matthew fall in love.
In 2021, fifteen-year-old Nick Chen has never felt like he belonged on the isolated Washington island where he lives with his single mother, Lily. He can't shake the sense she's hiding something. When Nick sets out to find his biological father, the journey threatens to raise more questions than it provides answers.
In immersive, moving prose, Rachel Khong weaves a profound tale of class and striving, race and visibility, and family and inheritance—a story of trust, forgiveness, and finally coming home.
Exuberant and explosive, Real Americans is a social novel par excellence that asks: Are we destined, or made? And if we are made, who gets to do the making? Can our genetic past be overcome?
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Author Rachel Khong invites us into the intimate lives of a Chinese-American family in this powerful multigenerational novel. Lily Chen is feeling stuck. As a disgruntled art history major and an unpaid intern at a glossy media company, she can barely pay her rent. But when the handsome, blond-haired, blue-eyed Matthew Maier—heir to a pharmaceutical fortune—steps into her life at a company Christmas party, she lets fate guide her into a new, unknown future. The novel is smartly split into three distinctively compelling sections: the first for Lily; the second for her teen son, Nick; and the third for her headstrong scientist mother, whose past research sends aftershocks through the lives of her daughter and grandson. In total, the sweeping and poignant tale spans 30 profound years in the lives of the Chens. Real Americans is an emotional pageturner, especially for anyone who’s ever felt lonely or misunderstood.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Khong returns (after Goodbye, Vitamin) with an impressive family drama. It opens in 1999 with 22-year-old narrator Lily, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, scraping by in New York City on an unpaid internship. When she meets über-wealthy and über-handsome Matthew it feels like a fairy tale, but a sense of imbalance between them remains as their relationship develops. Khong then fast-forwards to 2021, when Lily and Matthew's son, Nick, is a teenager. Lily and Matthew are no longer together or even in contact, though it's unclear why. Disconnected from his family history, Nick struggles to understand his identity. He reconnects with Matthew but finds the dynamic strained and ultimately relocates to San Francisco, where he crosses paths with his maternal grandmother, May, who narrates the novel's third section, set in 1960s China. Young, ambitious May (then called Mei Ling) attends Peking University on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. Khong is both a perceptive prose stylist and an accomplished storyteller, and she shines brightest when portraying differing cultural styles of parental love ("It wasn't American," Nick thinks at one point, "for to love as much as she did"). Khong reaches new heights with this fully-fledged outing.
Customer Reviews
Loved it
I enjoyed every page of this book I learned more about life in China than I had ever known. The characters came alive.
Terrible characters and disjointed plot.
The only thing I liked about this book was the last sentence. And the grandmother’s origin story. The rest of the book is tedious and trite with a plot that makes little sense and characters with little empathy and almost no relatability. It’s written as though it has some archetypal message when in reality it does not. It tries way too hard to have meaning when it has very little. It was a frustrating and annoying read for the most part.
Fantastic book and writing.
Great book.