January is a great time to stay indoors and curl up with a good book! Our annual Book Club reading will begin in January, and we’re co-hosting again with the Asian & Pacific Islanders OSU Alumni Society. This partnership offers us a chance to learn about another culture, and after reading, we will gather for dinner and discussion.
The book this year is “Banyan Moon,” by local author Thao Thai. A multi-generational story of family dynamics spanning decades and continents, it is a deeply moving story of mothers and daughters.
As usual we will join the API alumni for a dinner and discussion of the book with the author in March. A full description of the book is below, and you can get it from your library or purchase it at Amazon or local bookstores. Email us at OSUAlumniFranklinCounty@yahoo.com that you want to participate, and we’ll add you to the dinner invitation!
Full description of the book:
A sweeping, evocative debut novel following three generations of Vietnamese American women reeling from the death of their matriarch, revealing the family’s inherited burdens, buried secrets, and unlikely love stories.
When Ann Tran gets the call that her fiercely beloved grandmother, Minh, has passed away, her life is already at a crossroads. In the years since she’s last seen Minh, Ann has built a seemingly perfect life—a beautiful lake house, a charming professor boyfriend, and invites to elegant parties that bubble over with champagne and good taste—but it all crumbles with one positive pregnancy test. With both her relationship and carefully planned future now in question, Ann returns home to Florida to face her estranged mother, Huơng.
Back in Florida, Huơng is simultaneously mourning her mother and resenting her for having the relationship with Ann that she never did. Then Ann and Huơng learn that Minh has left them both the Banyan House, the crumbling old manor that was Ann’s childhood home, in all its strange, Gothic glory. Under the same roof for the first time in years, mother and daughter must face the simmering questions of their past and their uncertain futures, while trying to rebuild their relationship without the one person who’s always held them together.
Running parallel to this is Minh’s story, as she goes from a lovestruck teenager living in the shadow of the Vietnam War to a determined young mother immigrating to America in search of a better life for her children. And when Ann makes a shocking discovery in the Banyan House’s attic, long-buried secrets come to light as it becomes clear how decisions Minh made in her youth affected the rest of her life—and beyond.
Spanning decades and continents, from 1960s Vietnam to the wild swamplands of the Florida coast, Banyan Moon is a stunning and deeply moving story of mothers and daughters, the things we inherit, and the lives we choose to make out of that inheritance.