In a Cold Patch

Hi bookworms — how is everyone doing? It’s been a busy week here but I’m coming up for air now … after completing a couple things for my part-time jobs I had to get done. It was a really cold week too and the deer were on our road in 30+ herds looking for something to eat. They came running to our bird feeders. The photo shows just a small part of their group. The one deer in front stopped when he saw me taking a picture from the window. We usually let them have a snack or two in such cold weather, though they can drain the bird feeder pretty lickety-split, so eventually we put the feeders in the garage at night when we remember to.

Meanwhile the Super Bowl is on soon. Will you be watching the game, or skipping it? I admit I’m usually a big football fan, but neither of these teams playing is one of my teams, so we’ll be watching at home mostly for the ads, halftime show, and munchies. I hope there’ll be a Clydesdale Bud commercial with a Labrador puppy, lol. That would make me happy. But I think this year it’s going to be a young Clydesdale that’s the star in the ad this time. Watch for it. I still miss the puppy ad though, lol. You can rewatch it here on the link.

My reading has been a bit meandering due to busyness, but I’ll leave you with a couple reviews of what I finished lately. These two books below make a good pairing — and I didn’t even do it on purpose. The first is a novel about a female immigrant from Afghanistan who lives in Berlin and tries to hide her background amid her active night life, while the second is a memoir of a refugee from Vietnam (during the fall of Saigon in 1975) who grew up in Michigan and also describes trying to blend in and hide her background. The immigrant life is tough. Come to think of it, I also read the novel The Leavers in January, which is about immigrants from China in New York, so I guess I’m on a reading theme these days and I didn’t purposefully know I was doing it. I think what draws me to these kinds of tales are the challenges and perseverance immigrants show, and how the stories about them are often quite moving and well written. They certainly are especially relevant right now.

Good Girl by Aria Aber / Hogarth / 368 pages / 2025

3.7 stars. Nila, 19, who narrates this novel details a lost year she has going to night clubs in Berlin with friends and where she meets Marlowe, a thirty-six-year-old American writer who once wrote a notable book. Nila is going through some tough times and growing pains — taking drugs with her group, obsessing about Marlowe, and trying to hide her Afghan and poor background. She also misses her mother who died years earlier. Her parents were doctors in Afghanistan who fled a decade or so ago with her and then wound up in public housing in Berlin, graffitied with swastikas, where Nila was raised. They were unable to get good jobs.

Now Nila amid her partying tells those who ask that she’s Greek. She gets involved with Marlowe who’s controlling and at times violent … and much of the narration details their drug-taking and relationship over a year’s time. Nila seems to be trying to find and right herself …. to try for grad school and become a photographer, though she keeps disappointing herself and her father who expects her to be a “good girl.”

You have to read to the end to see if Nila continues on her path of self-destruction or gets on with it to something better. There’s some sharp writing throughout this debut, so although I tired of some of the continual cycle of partying and sex with Marlowe, I was impressed by the writing style and Nila’s impressions and the details of Berlin and pleased it ended a bit more upbeat. The author, first a poet, apparently grew up in Germany and now works as a writing professor at the University of Vermont. She was raised speaking Farsi and German and now writes in her third language, English.

Owner of a Lonely Heart by Beth Nguyen / Scribner / 256 pages / 2023

4 stars. I liked hearing the author narrate the audio of her life as a Vietnam refugee who when she was 8-months-old was taken by her father out of the country with her sister, uncles, and grandmother the day before fall of Saigon to North Vietnamese forces in 1975. Later she was raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan, by her father and stepmother and only came to meet her birth mother who was left or stayed behind in Vietnam until years later when she was 19. Her mother had come to the U.S. when she was 10 and had settled in Boston, yet they didn’t meet until years later.

Her memoir is clear, raw, and sincere describing what it was like growing up as an immigrant minority in a White Midwestern city and trying to understand her identity and their family dynamics, which wasn’t really talked about at the time with her often bad-tempered father. Much of it too talks about motherhood … trying to get know her own mother who she’s only visited a handful of times and is not close to and what happened in Vietnam when her mother stayed behind — along with being a mother herself to two young boys.

Part of the book feels like a memoir looking back on her life and school years in Michigan and other parts feel like essays about her perceptions as an immigrant in the U.S. and about motherhood. She wrote the book during the pandemic, which adds another dimension to it. Towards the end there’s a chapter about changing her Vietnamese name from Bich to Beth, which she does since it would cause less fuss and questions. Overall I was moved by the author’s story and perspective and liked her sensibilities.

I had forgotten I had read and liked the author’s 2015 novel Pioneer Girl and reviewed it on the blog. That’s when she was going by Bich Minh Nguyen, so I might not have realized this memoir was by the same author when I picked it up. She is a Guggenheim Fellow recipient, has an MFA from U of Michigan, and now teaches at the University of Wisconsin. I will look for what she writes next.

That’s all for now. What about you — have you read books like these and if so, what did you think? Enjoy your week.