Rachel Khong’s Real Americans is the latest pick for Jenna Bush Hager’s Today show book club.
Khong’s novel, published Tuesday by Knopf, follows Lily Chen, a Chinese American single mother raising her 15-year-old son, Nick, on an island off the Washington state coast. Nick tries to find his biological father, believing that his mother is hiding something from her past.
In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus praised the novel as “bold, thoughtful, and delicate at once, addressing life’s biggest questions through artfully crafted scenes and characters.”
Hager announced the book’s selection on Today, saying, “It’s a moving novel that spans three generations of one family. It is a love story, and it also is a story about why we are who we are.…I loved this book about forgiveness and what it means to finally come home.”
Khong told Today.com that she “was really interested in not just writing from one perspective, but writing from multiple perspectives and also writing about how different characters’ lives intersect.”
“It starts out as maybe a historical novel and then it’s maybe a romance, and then it’s something else—it sort of shapeshifts in terms of genre,” she said. “And that was by design. I was exploring American narratives and myths.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
